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WHEN our football leaders dumped the unpopular, and blundering, ZIFA Board led by Cuthbert Dube last year, we celebrated — like millions of Zimbabweans who love their football — because it represented a giant step in the right direction. Under Dube’s stewardship, which went on for five years, our national game suffered badly as its leader, who hardly showed any interest in its affairs, let alone its fortunes, dragged it back to the Stone Age. With reckless abandon he gave an impression that he owned our football.
Our national youth teams were banned from international competitions, paying the price for the blunders of their leadership, while a national game that had a debt of about $500 000, when Dube and his Board took over, was now sinking in a debt of more than $6 million.
The Warriors, our flagship national team, had been thrown out of the 2018 World Cup qualifiers, without kicking a ball in the ultimate humiliation a country can suffer on the international football scene, because Dube and his crew at ZIFA had failed to pay Brazilian coach Valinhos.
Clearly, Dube and his team had to go, to give our game a chance, and the arrival of Phillip Chiyangwa, who comprehensively beat his rivals in the race for the ZIFA presidency, brought in a wave of fresh air.
However, while everything appears to be going well on the field, there are explosive problems in the boardroom triggered by the bid by Chiyangwa and his leadership to dissolve debt-ridden ZIFA and replace it with the National Football Association of Zimbabwe.
Article 77 of the ZIFA constitution provides for the dissolution of ZIFA, saying that “any decision relating to the dissolution of ZIFA requires a majority of three quarters of all the members of ZIFA (ZIFA Council) which must be obtained at a Congress specifically convened for the purpose (and) if ZIFA is disbanded, its assets shall be transferred to the Sport and Recreation Commission Zimbabwe (who) shall hold these assets in trust as ‘bonus pater familiar’ until ZIFA is re-established. The final Congress may, however, choose another recipient for the assets on the basis of a three quarter majority.”
However, while ZIFA can dissolve itself, what has caused an uproar, including concerns that have been raised by the Government, is the way the whole process was handled because, clearly, the meeting where the dissolution of the association was conducted last month was not “specifically convened for the purpose” of dissolution as demanded by the association’s constitution.
What this means is that the ZIFA leaders violated their constitution and they need a climb down and concede that their attempts to dissolve the association, at an indaba that wasn’t convened specifically for that, was null and void and cannot be allowed.
The ZIFA creditors, who are owed millions of dollars, have been crying foul and believe the creation of NAFAZ is an attempt by the country’s football controlling leaders to fraudulently skip their obligation to pay what they owe and some of them have taken their cases to the High Court.
This whole confusion has attracted unwanted negative publicity for ZIFA, at a time when the association needed to be selling themselves as an organisation that had dumped its troubled past and was now ready to dine with sponsors who can provide the funding that it needs to meet its commitments.
Some power-hungry individuals are also feasting on the confusion and this week took over ZIFA House, claiming they were now the ones in charge of domestic football, while ordinary fans, tired of seeing their national game bathing in ugly headlines, are wondering if we have rolled back to the darkness of the Cuthbert Dube era.
Domestic football doesn’t need all this, at a time when our nation has been rising as a power in the game, and the sooner that Chiyangwa and his crew acknowledge that they were wrong, in the way they tried to go about the dissolution of ZIFA, the better for the game.
We also feel that people like Francis Zimunya and his group should give our football a chance to breathe rather than being common denominators, in all the confusion that stalks our national game, in the past dozen years.
Online Reporter