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DOMESTIC football will elect its leader for the next four years, and the board members who will help him steer the ship, when the zifa Assembly meets in Harare today for a landmark — if not controversial — poll that has drawn four candidates for the hot seat.Cuthbert Dube, who has led zifa for the past four years, is seeking re-election and will battle Leslie Gwindi, Nigel Munyati, and Trevor David Carelse-Juul.

The elections, as is usually the case in football, have attracted their fair share of bad publicity amid claims that the playing field isn’t level, which prompted two High Court petitions to the effect that the Electoral Code is being violated to suit certain interests and that votes are being traded for cash by councillors.

In an era where the country and its leadership have taken the grand initiative to battle corruption, it’s disappointing that our football continues to be stalked by the ghost of graft. And in an election season, it even becomes fashionable for some councillors to expect to be paid to vote in a certain way. That one of these councillors refused to accompany How Mine, as head of delegation to Nigeria this week, because there were richer pickings in the zifa polls, backs suspicions of foul play.

And that the Council has barely changed, with the same old characters who were there before the turn of the millennium still playing a role today, has probably contributed to this business-as-usual approach.

Reports of secret meetings, where regional councillors were given US$200 each just for attending made their way into the national media and provided more substance to the argument that these polls are not won fairly but in dark corners where brown envelopes loaded with cash exchange hands.

But away from all this controversy, which our national game has a responsibility to cut off from its tail as it moves forward, there is no doubting that the winner of the elections faces a daunting task to stabilise the ship and restore corporate confidence in an fa that has been hitting the headlines for all the wrong reasons recently.

The zifa president and his new board will have to find a way to deal with the huge debt, now estimated at more than US$6 million.

A large chunk of it is owed to Dr Dube, who bailed out the bankrupt association over the past four years.

The Messenger of Court has been a frequent visitor at zifa House as the association struggles to settle its dues and how the new leadership will liquidate that huge debt, and find enough financial resources to oil their operations, will be crucial as we move forward.

zifa have written a number of letters to fifa asking for financial help, but that has yielded nothing. The new leadership will have to find partners and other ways of generating funds. Our fa has failed to attract sponsors because it is weighed down by the negativity that stalks it, while the Premier Soccer League has a flagship sponsor, Delta Beverages, and a number of other good financial supporters led by Mbada Diamonds.

The Football Trust, a vehicle meant to get sponsorship for zifa, started off well but — as a key member testified recently — it soon lost its way in the murky waters of our football. The zifa leadership will have to re-brand an organisation whose image is presently unattractive to sponsors. This will remove the burden of always looking for money to fund various national teams’ assignments.

But you can’t do that when you are an organisation that is allergic to producing yearly audited financial statements, which the sponsors demand to ensure that their money is being used for the right reasons.

That zifa have struggled to produce their accounts in four years has been an Achilles Heel.

It’s an area that the new leadership will have to take care of as quickly as possible. Our national teams, especially the Warriors, have to be transformed into a competitive force once again and we hope that the new zifa leadership will give this the attention it deserves.

Hopefully we will not see the circus that we saw in the last four years where team coaches were changed at the drop of a hat. There is need to go back to the basics; and that means we need a zifa leadership that can take a serious look at the development of our grassroots structures, something that has been neglected for some time now.

Only then can we produce a Peter Ndlovu, a Moses Chunga, a Benjamin Nkonjera and a Willard Mashinkila-Khumalo. Football needs a leadership that can drive it forward, something that the game hasn’t had in recent years, and it’s that kind of leadership that we will be expecting to emerge from zifa Village today.