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Robson Sharuko Senior Sports Editor
THE controversial Zifa elections might have survived a High Court test yesterday but faces another hurdle in the form of parliamentary scrutiny after the association’s leaders were summoned to appear before Parliament tomorrow. The Sports Commission have also been summoned to appear before the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Education, Sport, Arts and Culture tomorrow and face grilling from lawmakers unhappy that they didn’t “deliver the supervisory role they promised, under oath, to help Zifa deliver a credible poll.”

Temba Mliswa, the chairman of the Parliamentary Portfolio Committee on Education, Sport, Arts and Culture, yesterday said there were a number of questions that needed to be satisfactorily answered by the Zifa leadership and their Electoral Committee to address concerns among the lawmakers that Saturday’s elections for the board members and president were not the culmination of a fatally flawed process.

Yesterday Justice Francis Bere dismissed an urgent High Court application by former Zifa board member, Saidi Sangula, for the association to be barred from holding the polls for the board members and their president in Harare on Saturday.

Justice Bere had submissions from both parties, on the merits of their cases, after having ruled that Sangula’s case was urgent and the High Court had jurisdiction to make a determination on the matter.

However, Justice Bere questioned Sangula’s timing of his poll challenge, coming as it did on the eve of the board elections, when polls for the other structures of the association had been held, and said reasons for his judgment will be released in due course. Sangula wanted the High Court to grant him an interdict barring Zifa from continuing with the electoral process, which would culminate in the polls for the board members and the president on Saturday, arguing that the Electoral Committee mandated with conducting the elections was “flawed in its composition.” Sangula said in his application that he had every reason to suspect that the Electoral Committee was sitting as a “hired gun in the interests of top-level people,” who were fighting in the battle for the right to lead Zifa.

Zifa wanted the court to withhold jurisdiction over the matter arguing that Sangula had not followed the terms laid out in the association’s constitution as well as the Electoral Code, which include that all appeals should be lodged with an Appeals Committee, chaired by lawyer Tawanda Chitapi, and the hearing conducted within 48 hours. While Zifa found relief in the High Court yesterday, with Justice Bere dismissing Sangula’s application, the association’s leadership have to leap another hurdle in Parliament tomorrow with lawmakers saying there were “serious issues that need to be addressed first” before the process can pass a credibility test needed to produce credible leadership.

“We have written to Zifa president Cuthbert Dube and his board to appear before our committee on Thursday to discuss a number of issues that have been raised pertaining to the way the whole election process for the various structures in our football is being handled,” Mliswa told The Herald yesterday.

“Football is our national sporting discipline and, by virtue of its place as the flagship sport of this country, it is important that the process being used to elect its leaders is a credible one so that this game, which means a lot to the people of this country, gets the leadership that it deserves and not a leadership that comes in against a background of a process that has been tampered with to promote a certain agenda and certain people.

“A lot of noise has been raised in recent weeks related to the flaws that have been detected in the process being used, including issues related to the violation of the Code being used in the elections, which should be the bible on which these polls are conducted.

“There are issues about the constitution being violated, issues about exorbitant nomination fees that were used and issues about alleged cases of corruption that have been raised and all this appears to point to an election that is not credible.

“As parliamentarians we cannot just sit and watch, pretending as if nothing is happening, when such issues are raised and we believe we have a duty to protect the credibility of our national game and that is why we have some questions that we want answered and areas that we want addressed before we can give our approval to this election process.”

Mliswa told The Herald that, if their concerns were not addressed, they had the authority to bar certain processes from being completed.
“There is a huge price to pay for that and I don’t believe anyone will be foolish to just treat us as irrelevant individuals especially when we have serious questions that need to be addressed about something that is a national issue.

“We have also summoned the Sports Commission to appear before our committee on Thursday because we have issues with their representatives who gave us a commitment, under oath, that there were going to address issues we raised concerning the Zifa elections but seemingly didn’t do anything when they left Parliament Building.

“When the Sports Commission last appeared before our committee we raised the issue of the exorbitant nomination fees in the Zifa polls and, under oath, they told us that they were going to address the issue but nothing changed and we are concerned about that.

“The Sports Commission should play the supervisory role, ensuring the sports associations’ constitutions are respected, and how does the Sports Commission explain the fact that they are giving Zifa the greenlight to go ahead with the elections when audited financial statements, which should have been with delegates a long time ago, have not been produced by the association?

“The Sports Commission Act is clear in terms of the punishment that is meted to associations that don’t produce their audited financial statements and it’s an issue that we want addressed when we meet them because we are yet to see the Zifa accounts.”

Former Premier Soccer League chairman Tapiwa Matangaidze, who is a member of the same parliamentary portfolio committee, said recently that as legislators they had a supervisory role to ensure that Zifa deliver a credible election.

“As legislators, we are coming in a supervisory role, not as participants, and we want the best people to run our football,” Matangaidze said.

“The concern, mainly, is how do we make the elections a better process, how do we give it more credibility so that, at the end of the day, the best person wins.

“What has been happening in the past, there have been allegations that the electoral college, the people who vote are bused in to some destination, are holed up in some hotel and the vote is influenced that way.

“We want to move away from that because we want to sell a credible election to the Government, to Parliament, to the sponsors and if Zifa does its job well, and nobody is pointing fingers after elections, that would be in the best interest of the sport.”