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Fifty-eight Zifa councillors vote for the president of the football mother body today. The election at the Zifa Village in Harare is a culmination of a long, largely gentlemanly campaign in which candidates avoided overly dirty tactics and concentrated on football issues.
Like in a general election, focus in this campaign tended to be on the presidency, even though the 58 electors are also choosing a board. Outgoing president Cuthbert Dube is being challenged by Nigel Munyati, Leslie Gwindi and Trevor Carelse-Juul.
One or two of the candidates have had substantially bad Press in recent months over alleged financial impropriety where they work or worked fulltime, issues that some could have used to gain political capital for themselves. Essentially, it must be said, these were non-football matters.
However, for some and in some settings, they can raise questions on the personal integrity of the candidate seeking to lead the biggest sporting discipline in the country. Despite this, the candidates focused on issues related to football.
Each of the four has been in football for many years at senior levels. Gwindi has been Premier League secretary general and was part of the Dynamos executive that steered the club to the Caf Champions League final in 1998 and is now Harare City chairman. Munyati played in the 1970s for Black Aces and Rio Dairibord and more recently, gave us arguably our best players at the moment, Knowledge Musona and Khama Billiat through his Aces Youth Soccer Academy.
Dube sponsored Buymore, a club that campaigned in the top flight a few years ago, and is the incumbent going into today’s election. Carelse-Juul played football at a high level and chaired Zifa when the Warriors were a Dream Team in the 1990s. So the quartet is a team of football people.
Gwindi is promising a cleaner and more professional management of the game to attract the much-needed corporate sponsorship. Munyati is promising the same. Carelse-Juul is pledging the same plus greater involvement of the government at the level of financially and materially supporting national teams. Continuity is what Dube wants, to enable him to finish off projects he started or has been implementing.
As the 58 councillors pick the man to hold office for the next four years they must know that they are doing so on behalf of millions of fans who support their national teams; those who get so dispirited when their teams lose that they cannot eat. This is so because soccer is Zimbabwe’s biggest sporting discipline.
It is a profound responsibility. In other words, when the 58 cast their votes today, they must not vote for individuals per se, but vote for football; football must win.
Whoever wins this election needs to work to ensure that national teams do well. For our teams to do well, to prepare well for competitions, and for us to remunerate the players and technical teams properly, we need money. And the money has to come, not necessarily from a government that is struggling to pay for basics like healthcare, but from the corporate sector.
This would be the challenge; the winner must bring back firms to sponsor the game. We don’t want our teams, particularly our flagship, the Warriors, to camp for a day before a match simply because there is no money to fund a longer training period. We don’t want our boys to be locked out of hotels because Zifa can’t pay for their accommodation. We don’t want them to go hungry and have the coach to use his money to feed them.
Our national teams also need to be kitted well. A situation whereby they wore Nike yesterday, wear Adidas today, Legea tomorrow, and Puma the next day does not project an image of a serious national team.
These might look small, inconsequential details, but when put together their sum frequently yields poor results on the field. When we motivate our players and get the results, our rankings improve. We, as a country, earn more respect as a footballing nation and many of our players can be able to secure trials, even deals at more serious leagues in Europe.
While one or two clubs are doing something in junior development, there is the feeling that the national teams are not complementing them. In recent months Zifa failed to send a few junior national soccer teams to competitions abroad. This does not get our game forward.
The 58 must vote for the game, not individuals.
Online Reporter