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The opening of the new Heart Stadium, built by the Prophetic Healing and Deliverance Church in Harare’s Waterfalls, by President Mnangagwa yesterday marks the first new sporting infrastructure in the capital city for a good few years and goes against the general trend of declining facilities.

So the President was rightly impressed, both at the venture itself and the determination to meet quality standards and the latest requirements for the top range of stadiums, such as bucket seats.

While just 5 000 seats are installed in the first stage opened yesterday, that will be doubled in a couple of months and the stadium has a final capacity of 40 000, making it a very large venue that meets the requirements already of the Confederation of African Football.

The stadium was also an example of Zimbabweans finding new ways, our ways, of developing our country and its facilities and not relying on outsiders or on models generated by outsiders.

When PHD decided to invest in a stadium and hotel it had to go way beyond the world of churches, and had to do a lot of hard graft itself, from getting the planning permission, finding out about the required standards and the like.

As we build, rebuild and renovate our sporting infrastructure we need to follow President Mnangagwa’s advice and move outside the box, something many of our successes in this area have already shown.

There is the National Sports Stadium build in the traditional manner through the Government, although with generous support from China, but most of the rest of our sporting infrastructure came through home-grown solutions, or at least was financed by home grown solutions.

Major mining companies have over the years sponsored football teams, premier division teams, at what would otherwise be fairly small centres, and have had to build the stadiums these teams use as their home grounds and have consequently done a lot to build up the sports facilities in otherwise remote parts of Zimbabwe.

Then we have a range of major facilities, the ones that are now needing urgent major rehabilitation and upgrading, in our cities.

Rufaro Stadium, Gwanzura Stadium, Barbourfields Stadium, Sakubva Stadium, Ascot Stadium, to name just some, were built by city councils and run by them. That is not that unusual around the world.

What is unusual is the financing. These facilities were built when the city councils had a monopoly on liquor sales in the residential areas set aside for indigenous people, and which would even in a non-racial society be the working class council housing estates. That monopoly was intended to stop residents getting too drunk.

But a tiny handful of smarter people also saw the monopoly as a way of painlessly creating a flow of profits that could be used to create services, and among them some quality sporting facilities.

Those flows vanished within a few years of independence and the end of the monopoly and the total inability of the councils to run competitive services.

Other facilities were also created with smart financing. The racecourses in Harare and Bulawayo, built on free council land, were financed through levies on betting. And the sports clubs of the lower density suburbs were again on low-rent local authority land, but financed through low membership rates and more importantly the bar profits.

Liquor licencing laws at that time forced bottle stores to close at 5pm, and allowed only a few bars to operate, all in hotels. Sports clubs got round this with their special licences and again the liberalisation of liquor licensing meant far fewer bar profits diverted to sports infrastructure.

Councils were supposed to make some money from renting out their facilities, the ones built with beer money, but poor administration, diversion of the rent to other purposes, and the like made this less useful. Now the facilities are so bad no one wants to rent.

In the latest Budget, the Government has allocated more money for the renovation of some sports infrastructure. But there are a lot of pressures on the Budget and no one ever gets enough.

Cricket Zimbabwe, as the administrator of a test side, does get a slice of the global television rights to international cricket so is financing its needs, but everyone else needs help at least in some form.

Investors like PHD can do their share, and we hope the example set by Prophet Walter Magaya will be emulated, but we need other direct sources of cash.

Here we could look at our own heritage, the one that created many of the existing facilities in the first place.

While a small levy on liquor sales that would be used to fund sports and recreation infrastructure would perhaps be the easiest to collect and administer, there would be objections from many drinkers, even though many of those like to watch sport.

Another similar outcome could come from local authorities having to bank a slice of their liquor licensing revenue for use for sports and recreation facilities, that is a slice of the licences for bottle stores, including supermarket bottle stores, for bars, for sports bars, for night clubs and for restaurant licences.

If these were raised a bit fair enough, but even at present rates they would bring in a significant block of cash.

Of course in both schemes some sort of independent accounting would be needed rather than see city councils spend the money on luxury cars and special seminar conferences in expensive resorts, or on trips to developed countries to personally study the facilities there.

But either way, it would be a near unique way to raise the funds that sports facilities need, and then keep them going, although better facilities would produce good rent revenue. So it would just be a case of good administration, and if the Government is chipping in through cash, legal changes or both, it should be able to at least be approving spending.

There may be other ways we can raise money for sport and recreation, and as President Mnangagwa suggested, we should be thinking creatively as Zimbabweans, to find Zimbabwean solutions.