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DOMESTIC football this week woke up to the depressing news that Harare City Council was withdrawing the sponsorship of Harare City Football Club.

The Council also dissolved the club’s executive committee led by Alois Masepe in a purge that also saw the club’s chief executive Tafadzwa Bhasera and marketing manager Osborne Maranda relieved of their duties.

The decision was made during a Special Full Council Meeting held at Town House this week and it has since been communicated to ZIFA and other football stakeholders. The announcement by Council, through the club patron Jacob Mafume, was probably the darkest patch in the history of the club.

Harare City Football Club, which has been in existence for the past 34 years, is now facing an uncertain future. This could be the end of the club, who knows! The developments at Harare City have left the domestic football fraternity baffled. Players and officials are not sure about the future and the club’s supporters are in the dark as well.

The ZIFA Northern Region Soccer League, where the club is now playing, had to call urgent meetings with the Council to get a clearer picture of what exactly is happening at Harare City.

This is a club that has played at the highest level of domestic football, and becoming the first club ever to win two Chibuku Super Cup titles – the country’s premier knockout tournament.

They have also played continental football, representing Zimbabwe in the CAF Confederation Cup using the Chibuku Super Cup winners’ ticket.

They had a twinning arrangement with German Bundesliga side 1860 Munich, owned by the Munich municipality of Germany, who are Harare’s sister city. But all that could be history if the audit and further investigation to be instituted by the Harare City Council discover the club to be a liability, a conduit for looting of ratepayers’ money.

The executive committee led by Masepe has been dismissed on similar allegations of fleecing the club coffers as well as their “failure to follow laid down procedures”.

Masepe and his management team have also been accused of “personalising the club” and the Mayoral Mansion which they were using as club offices, as well as the general lack of transparency in running the club. While the City should be commended for the vision to invest in sport as a social responsibility, it seems greed had taken over. Some unscrupulous individuals have seen this as an opportunity to steal from the taxpayer.

The City has a sports budget running into millions, and it covers golf, volleyball, netball, basketball, inter-cities tournament, women’s soccer, junior soccer, councillors ward sports kits acquisition, ward sports facilities development, council sports tournament and the flagship senior men’s football team, which obviously consumed about US$1,5 million of the estimated US$6million sports budget. The Sunshine Boys have always been one of the most financially backed teams in both leagues. But then there have been concerns that some people within the opposition-led institution had hijacked the sports, and the football project in particular, which they transformed into a conduit to embezzle council funds. Therefore, the revelations of corruption this week by Mayor Mafume should not come as a surprise.

The council football club has a history of corruption and misappropriation of funds. The residents, through their various representative organisations, have since long back called for transparency in how the ratepayers money was being used to finance sports, especially the football club.

Over the years, Harare City Council could have lost millions due to corruption and financial misappropriation.

“It is not fair and should not be continued. Council will not sponsor any dubious organisations or football clubs at the expense of everyone. This has to stop,” said Mafume this week.

“All funding will cease with immediate effect until such an anomaly is corrected. An interim committee will be put in place to conduct and also consider whether it is necessary to keep funding a football club at this point.

“It might not be necessary but we have to look into that. An audit must also be instituted as to the use of funds that have been given to the football clubs. There is a need to rethink the funding model of Harare City Football Club.”

His predecessor Bernard Manyenyeni and the city’s ex-chairperson of the finance and development committee, Councillor Norman Markham, also raised the red flags some years ago.

Manyenyeni at some point lifted the lid off the spending spree at Harare City Football Club, saying the team’s officials blew a staggering $6 million in ratepayers’ money in one season to finance their doomed campaign in the domestic Premiership, which ended in the humiliation of relegation in 2017.

For the record, the club was relegated twice in the last 10 years – in 2017 and 2022 – despite the huge budgets.

Successive Harare Mayors, who automatically assume the position of patron of the club, have been on record claiming that council’s expenditure on sports is shrouded in secrecy and this is a clear pointer to some form of corruption or misappropriation of funds.

Harare City raised eyebrows in 2016 after it emerged the Sunshine Boys were sending a bloated delegation of 43 people to Madagascar for their CAF Confederation Cup tie against AS Adema.

The delegation cost the club about $54 000 in airfares alone. The recommended squad delegation by CAF standards is usually between 25 and 30 people. Clubs, though, can decide to have bigger delegations depending on their financial muscle.

This delegation was actually whittled down from 56 after reservations about the size of the travelling party were raised, given that the Premiership side is sponsored from public funds.

In June 2017, there was also an uproar over the huge spending by a council delegation accompanying a Harare City basketball team to Swaziland for a tournament.

All these are signs of a sick Council. At least they are seeing the log in their eye. But of concern is they have perpetuated the problem over the years, which raises the question on how sincere the council is with dealing with corruption. Hopefully, the Harare City Football Club will not be a victim of the greed and corruption in the opposition-led Council.