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Robson Sharuko
Editor
TWENTY FOUR people have left the Dynamos structures, where they served various roles in either the executive committee or coaching staff, since Bernard Marriot became board chairman.
Twenty one are men and only three are women.
Chioniso Mashakada, who like Yvonne Mangunda was the club’s media representative, was the last of the women to leave.
Esther Mawere was the other woman who was recruited into the Dynamos executive.
She even rose all the way to become the first, and only woman, to be named club vice-chairperson.
But, at a club where the conservatives pushed out physiotherapist Abigail Munikwa, simply because their Stone Age beliefs told them a woman brings bad luck, Mawere, Mangunda and Mashakada were never going to last.
This week, Genesis Mangombe became the 24th member, of either the Dynamos executive or coaching staff, to leave the Glamour Boys, under the watch of Marriot.
That’s enough to send two teams, of 11 players either side, into a pitch for a social football game.
The two teams can even afford the luxury of each having a substitute to draft in, when the going gets tough.
Mangombe lasted exactly a year at the Glamour Boys, after having replaced Herbert Maruwa, in August last year.
When one considers the huge turnover volume of those who have come by the front door and left by the back door at DeMbare, Mangombe should consider himself a lucky man to have lasted this long.
The man he replaced, Maruwa, lasted just eight months in the job.
Both Mangombe and Maruwa join a Dynamos coaching graveyard.
This is where one finds the likes of Kalisto Pasuwa, who won four straight league championships before, in the first year that Marriot became board chairman, his contract was not renewed. Despite being the only man to win four league championships on the bounce, Pasuwa didn’t appeal to Marriot, who took over as board chairman in April 2014.
It meant that at the end of that season, despite another championship in the bag, Pasuwa had to leave the club he calls home. Ten years after he left, DeMbare are yet to win the league championship.
If they don’t win it this year, which looks very unlikely, they would have created a record, for all the wrong reasons.
It would mark the longest barren run, without winning the championship, for the country’s biggest and most successful football club.
The last time they endured such a barren run was nine years, between 1997 and 2006, when they went without a league title.
They ended that lengthy wait by winning the league in 2007 under David Mandigora.
The coach, who took DeMbare to the semi-final of the CAF Champions League in 2008, returned to that role in 2015 but he quickly realised this was a different Dynamos to the one he used to know.
This was Marriot’s Dynamos and, halfway into the season, Mandigora was sacked.
Six years later, Mandigora, the boyhood DeMbare fan who started playing for his favourite club as a teenager, died.
Marriot was accused of snubbing his funeral as he did not visit the Mandigora home, to pay his condolences, or attend his burial ceremony at Glenforest Memorial Park.
However, he rejected those claims.
“We have had a difficult time in the last few days,” he said.
“Right now, I am driving to Lower Gweru for a funeral. We have received the sad news that one of my uncles has died.
“It’s actually the second funeral that I will be attending in a week.”
Gift Muzadzi, Lloyd Mutasa, Naison Muchekela, Desmond Mhene, Paulo Jorge Silva, Tonderai Ndiraya and some of the coaches who have come and gone since Marriot took over, ten years ago.
The other executive committee members who have left the club, under the watch of Marriot, are Moses Chikwariro, Francis Madzinga, Tinashe Farawo, Graham Mafoko, Musa Gwasira, Vincent Chawonza, Solomon Sanyamandwe, Isiah Mupfurutsa, Webster Chikengezha and Kenny Mubaiwa.
Mubaiwa was the club executive boss for eight years and the architect of their four championship wins on the trot. When he left, Mubaiwa said something, which remains true to this day.
“I have tried my best under the most difficult conditions. I have always wished the best for this club and sacrificed a lot but it seems all my efforts were being frustrated of late.
“The most painful part is that the blame for all the club’s ills have been laid squarely on my feet yet I’m not in control of the running of the club.
“It’s not fair.
“It’s like I had been reduced to a ceremonial president. You can not be a president without the power to make decisions.
“I have worked under the late Richard Chiminya and (Freddy) Mkwesha at Dynamos and there wasn’t much interference.
“For me it’s painful to leave but the pain is just the same even if I stay.”
Mubaiwa might not have mentioned him by name but his statement was very clear that Marriot interferes a lot in the way the club is run.
That is what Chawonza also said, when he resigned, and the same thing which Gwasira said, when he threw in the towel.
While Marriot will always find others, who are ready to serve the club because either they genuinely love it or they also love the fantasy of the ‘power’ that comes with those leadership roles, to replace those who leave. The problem for him is that while the faces of the men and women who have been running Dynamos, over the past 10 years, there is little, if not nothing, to show for all these changes.
The only common denominator to all this mediocrity is Marriot himself.
He is the King without a crown, the man who seemingly blames everyone else, except himself, for the way Dynamos have been reduced from being a prime football brand to just an ordinary franchise.
The more things have appeared to be changing, the more they have stayed the same at Dynamos.
The reason is the Big Brother who is evicting everyone else except himself.
Online Reporter