In Zimbabwe, football is a way of life, virtually a religion. Zimbabwean football is dominated by one important reality — a considerable lack of financial resources when compared with the dominant soccer nations of the world, or even the continent.
Despite its lack of organisation, soccer is an extremely popular sport in Zimbabwe.
Football impacts on the quality of life because the experience connects us with others and allows us to escape the pain, troubles, and hurt that we experience in our daily lives.
Jordi Royo, a psychologist at the Palliative Care Unit and Home Care Team at the Fundacio Hospital Saint Jaume Santa Magdalena in Mataró, Spain, demonstrated that cancer patients’ symptoms were lessened or alleviated while watching football matches.
But we don’t need to be cancer patients to understand how football shapes our views towards life. A football game is a performance.
The players are actors in a drama whose laws govern play but do not pre-determine it.
The spectators come from different perspectives in the world to share the game.
Football has become a cultural institution that defines our own identity.
But if you look at our football, and the challenges it is facing now, you tend to feel that we have come to the end of the road, that we have never been this far into this mess and we can’t sink any deeper or get any worse than this.
Where are we getting it wrong to such an extent that we can’t even have our own Drogba, Essien or Kanu and the only player who is showing promise of greatness, Knowledge Musona, has to battle all kinds of challenges to play for the national team?
Zifa, Its Councillors And Their Role In Football
I have often been seized with the thought of what exactly is the role of Zifa councillors in Zimbabwean football, I should be forgiven for thinking that they only surface at election time and hibernate once their preferred candidate has come to power. I will be interested to know what the Zifa councillors said about Asiagate, especially how this issue has been handled, or it is mishandled, and the serious effects that the questionable handling of this process will have on future generations in this game.
While one could argue that it would be right to show some respect for the Zifa Board and the Zifa Councillors, these institutions, being of a public nature, have to earn that respect, it cannot be bought. The Zifa board is our servant, and its members are servants of the public, and not the other way around. As our servants, the board members work on behalf of us, for the good of our football because it belongs to us, and if they do well, in that supervisory role, they earn our respect. Pure and simple!
If they don’t, as has often been the case in the way our national game has been administered in the past two years, then we have a right to ask questions and to be provided with answers.
They are like Members of Parliament, they represent our constituency of football, and as and when it is necessary, we have a right to ask questions and be provided with answers.
Today in Zimbabwean football we have an Animal Farm set-up where some pigs want us all to blindly chant that the Zifa Board has delivered, whilst it’s all in the open that this board has dismally failed the nation.
How do we explain, in the best language that public relations can give us, how we failed the Under-17 and Under-20 teams, gave them so much hope that they would complete their race but, somewhere, along the way, we bungled terribly and left them stranded? The Zifa Board took a rather stark and simplistic view that the Government should have chipped in with funds to sponsor the Under-17s trip to Congo Brazzaville, but there is no mention of when this request was sent to Government.
It seemed to suggest — quite wrongly, in my view — that Zifa wanted to apportion the blame to the Government for its failure to make travel arrangements for the team.
The Government is seized with serious national issues, involving securing food for thousands if not millions of its hungry citizens, trying to revive failed companies, trying to secure drugs to keep the nation healthy and accommodating last-minute travel arrangements, for the national football team, should be the least of its concerns.
There are several fatal shortcomings with this current Zifa Board, over the way it has managed football generally, and the national teams in particular.
Sponsorship has not been forthcoming and Cuthbert Dube has been Good Samaritan to the Zifa cause, and the nation at large, but not even the richest man in our country can continue to run a national football association from his pocket, and make a success story of it.
If someone can tell me what all the other board members, save for Mavis Gumbo, have been doing for the last two years, I will lend that person my attention. Consider them one by one, from Mudhara Gumede right to the representative of the Southern Region, try and think about what they have been doing, in the services of football, which has nothing to do with Asiagate, and you will see my point that it wouldn’t have made any difference if they were not there in the first place.
Zifa must be commended for taking the bold steps to clean our football but must also, at the same time, consult widely all key stakeholders and legal experts on how best to finalise the Asiagate matter. It appears there are prima facie legal loopholes that will be exploited by the accused and the mere fact that Fifa haven’t endorsed the sanctions applied by Zifa, almost a month after they effected them, tells the true story of the weaknesses of their case.
No sponsorship has been found for our mainstream football for the last three years.
We continue to make ill-considered appointments for the national team coaches.  No welfare programme has been set up for the current players and the retired players.
The e-based database for tracking the development of our youth talent is just a pipe dream. There is no investment in youth football, yet we expect the teams to perform at this level, and become feeders for the Warriors.
There is no doubt that Zifa inherited a rotten administrative structure, but what have they done to correct it? The Zifa Constitution needs to be revamped and a clause of no-confidence inserted in it.  This is the best way to go in a constitutional democracy like ours.
The whole Zifa Assembly is the problem but, unfortunately, we have ordered a wrong prescription to a misdiagnosed ailment.
The Zifa board cost us a place at Afcon 2013, when we were just 90 minutes away, the hastily-exonerated players were imposed onto a technical committee whose capacity to deliver was already questionable and it became a cocktail of one disaster after another.
Some people have suggested that Zifa can’t fire the technical team right now, despite its failure to take us to Angola and the big part Rahman Gumbo’s poor decision making in played in all this, because the coaches will hold a press conference tomorrow and tell the world the true story of what happened in the lead-up to the game. The interference from the association was there for everyone to see and why players, who had spent years being demonised as mercenaries, were thrust into the team, without any form of rehabilitation, only the people at Zifa can explain and, I’m so sure, Rahman has a lot to say on this one.
What surely was the mandate of the technical committee and why has the technical committee, which was so visible when we won at home against Angola, suddenly gone quiet?
Is this a committee that only wants to be associated with success?
Zifa should just fire the technical crew and the technical committee and give our football a fresh start, but now they are being diplomatic for nothing, insisting on a technical report.
The technical team should have been fired in Angola, shortly after the disaster, but because Zifa imposed players on the technical team, they are scared that Rahman and his men will expose them if they are pushed into a corner.
We have no choice at this stage but to conclude that Zifa has failed and should disband itself rather than wait to be disbanded.
That should be the starting point, the dissolution of this Zifa Board, or if the guys still care for their reputations, which is being torn apart every day, then they should do the honourable thing and resign. The legal arm of Zifa has also played havoc, yes the Mhurushomana matter might have been inherited, and they lost it, now he is claiming more than US$200 000, including airtime money.
Norman Mapeza has won his case and the Harare Arbitrator Caleb Mucheche tore Zifa to shreds, the High Court in Bulawayo nullified the suspension of Gift Banda from the Zifa Board and, if they don’t allow him to attend meetings, they will be in contempt of court.
The cases of Sunday Chidzambwa and Madinda Ndlovu are pending and there will be many more, a storm of them, as big as Hurricane Katrina, from the Asiagate mess.
My question is — who has surely given Zifa the mandate that they are a law unto themselves and can disregard their constitution as and when they choose to do so, as and when they feel like doing so? It is quite clear that Zifa need to consult labour law experts on labour matters, not necessarily any other lawyer. It’s just a case of giving a Shona teacher the mandate to examine a Physics paper.
So, rather than have a Zifa lawyer who takes care of labour issues, constitutional issues, and any other issues, the association should have a legal advisor who will tell them, depending on the case, which lawyers in the country are best qualified to handle such cases.
Zifa don’t need a GP approach when it comes to legal advice. They need a specialist approach and that is why they need to shift from their traditional methods of doing business when it comes to legal advice.
The Ministry of Education, Sports Arts and Culture
The Ministry of Education, Sports Arts and Culture should play a big role in the development of the national game in Zimbabwe.
It is an uncontested view that football is the national game in Zimbabwe, but it is in the open, too, that the national game has been relegated by its parent Ministry.
Kenya has recognised that athletics is the national sport, and that is why the Kenyans continue to dominate, Jamaica is renowned for its athletics prowess the world over and they concentrate on that, the sprints, and not the marathon. India has embraced cricket as its national sport and it is viewed as a religion there. What about us? The significance of the national game in Zimbabwe has been diminished even though football is bigger than anything you can think about in our country.
When the Sables lose, there is no uproar, but when the Warriors lose it reverberates across the length and breadth of Zimbabwe.
Why then are the Ministry not taking charge of the game? Why are the Ministry not taking stock of the administration of the game? Why does the Ministry appear to be afraid of Zifa, as if the football mother body is the superior structure, when the reverse is true?
Justice Paddington Garwe led a Commission of Enquiry into the management of football in Zimbabwe in 1998, and the Enquiry brought to fore the glaring incompetence and graft inherent in the national game. Among some of the recommendations were the limitation of terms for all in the administrative echelons of the game to two terms and that all candidates in football administration should at least have 5 O’ Levels. Now, we have some Zifa councillors who have been in office for more than 30 years and with no value addition at all to the game. 
I wonder how many Zifa councillors have this minimum requirement.  Why is the parent Ministry not concerned that this recycled dead wood, among the councillors, is the biggest problem we have right now in terms of lifting ourselves from our football quagmire?
Come on David Coltart!
You are a football fan yourself, Bosso and Celtic. You know we can do better in the way we are handling out football. Just read the feedback columns of our newspapers, thank God we now get some hard copies down here, and see what the real football fans are saying.
They might be emotional but all these people can’t be wrong.
As they say, the Zifa leaders can fool some of the people all of the time, and in this group I have a good list of journalists who belong in this category, all of the people some of the time, and in this group I have some crazy and bogus supporters’ groups, but they can never fool all of the people all of the time, in this group I have the true fans of this game. In Zimbabwe and, across Africa, the domestic leagues are financially unstable, administratively corrupt and lack quality stadiums and training facilities.
While it is possible that the long-term impact of the World Cup could improve some of these issues, it’s not going to happen soon and might not happen at all. African leagues will struggle economically as long as their parent nations also struggle financially.
It is exceedingly difficult for the Zimbabwean league to succeed when almost every decent player from the domestic league is shipped to play in South Africa and beyond.
What have we, as a nation, benefited from shipping players to South Africa? Has there been any improvement in their technique when they come back home to play for the Warriors? When Moses Chunga went to Belgium, we all saw the difference when he came back to play for the national team.
The same is also true about Peter. Fast forward to this era and it’s a different ball game together. Why, why, why, why, we ask?
Regionalism and Tribalism In Zimbabwe Football
Regionalism is a destructive phenomenon that threatens the nexus between people because it pits city, ethnic, and class identities against each other in a horrible way.
Regionalism is universally derided as a major problem for the game. It is something that nearly anyone can recognise.
When our national coaches sit to name the national team, all the regional bias should not come into play because the players would be playing for Zimbabwe and not Harare or Bulawayo. Fans should rally behind whoever is selected to be the coach of the national teams.
But when we choose national coaches, as happens to be the case now, simply because they played for a certain team in the country, and they get their wings irrespective of lack of experience, then we are inviting trouble when the experiments fail. When the head coach of the Under-23 national team has little experience, when compared to his assistant who is not only coaching the biggest football team in the country but making a success of that, then you are asking people to see shadows.
When the national coaches fail, and nothing is done to them, then you are opening yourselves to accusations that you can’t touch them because they are from your part of town.
With time people lose interest in such projects, even though they are national projects, and you end up getting 4 000 people at Rufaro to watch the Warriors, as was the case in the last game against Angola. If we go on and pretend that there isn’t tribalism in our national game, pretend there isn’t regionalism in football, and that certain appointments were only made possible by regional alliances, then we won’t solve anything.
We should face our challenges before we start looking for a solution.We have a huge challenge and either we live in denial, and die slowly, or we confront it and win at the end.
Soccer is a creative enterprise that connects people across political, geographic, and temporal boundaries.
Soccer then is part of the creative economy, because it emphasises our humanity.
As We Move Forward
As we move forward I propose that:
l Have a stand-alone Ministry of Sports that recognises football as the national game
l Disband the entire Zifa
l Draft and implement a new Zifa constitution
l Redefine the Role of the Zifa Councillors
l Develop and entrench at all levels a uniform Zimbabwean national football philosophy
l Build and upgrade national performance centres, and Universities should play a key role in research
l National team coaches and administrators should have performance-related contracts
l Introduce football and netball as part of the education curriculum
l Train and deploy sufficient coaches at both club and school levels
l Build a rich and robust talent identification and development pipeline that starts at under-13 age level  at local levels
l Build and administer a comprehensive national competition framework built on at school levels
l Deploy and upgrade infrastructure and administration
l Identify and utilise the best and most appropriate technology at all levels
l Use the best-researched and most up-to-date practice of sports science and medicine to ensure the full development of players.
While football has massive potential to be a nation builder in Zimbabwe, our administrators of the game have conspired to put our national game on the scrap heap and the nation is divided. Zifa, as far as I can see, have lost the support of the nation and their mandate to keep leading the national game.
Let’s start from afresh and it means disbanding everything, not the Warriors alone, but even our leaders at Zifa House.
The writer Milton Nyamadzawo is the former manager of Mwana Africa Football Club who is pursuing an academic career in South Africa. He can be reached on [email protected]

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