Goodluck Cosafa with Chiyangwa

Dingilizwe Ntuli, Sports Editor
CONGRATULATIONS to Philip Chiyangwa for being elected president of regional football body Coasafa unopposed at the organisation’s annual general meeting at Sun City in South Africa on Saturday.

He took over from Suketu Patel of Seychelles, who completed two five-year terms in office. Chiyangwa will be at the helm of Cosafa up to the next elective AGM in 2021.

Safa president Danny Jordaan, who was also vying for the top post, withdrew from the race before the vote, leaving Chiyangwa as the sole candidate.

He will be deputised by Frans Mbidi of Namibia and they will work with an executive committee comprising General Pedro Neto (Angola), Andrew Kamanga (Zambia), Sameer Sobha (Mauritius), Alberto Simanga (Mozambique) and Walter Nyamilandu-Manda (Malawi).

Chiyangwa was naturally delighted and said he was “happy and humbled” to lead. We hope these are not just words and that he will not turn Cosafa into the colossal mess Zifa has become under his stewardship.

Football management in Zimbabwe is in a state of confusion. Controversy seems central to the mandate of his Zifa administration and as we head into Christmas, we are no closer to figuring out how many teams will be promoted to the PSL for the 2017 season. If anything, the situation has just got a whole lot murkier, as Zifa attempts to effect a coup at the PSL and take over the running of the league.

Chiyangwa has effectively made himself executive president of Zifa and it would be interesting to see if Cosafa allows him to export his bullying and unilateral tendencies to the regional bloc.

There are clearly no well-defined roles at Zifa and everything starts and ends with Chiyangwa and we pray that Cosafa has defined roles to ensure he doesn’t set about trying to reform the organisation by acting first and postponing the thinking to a later date, if ever, as he has been doing at Zifa.

This approach has largely seen Chiyangwa and Zifa largely achieving headlines as their visible form of delivery, and we hope Cosafa does not grant such unfettered powers to its president because it too will make numerous unfavourable headlines in member countries.

The sponsors Chiyangwa pledged to bring on board to fund development must be reputable and not his questionable “personal” Zifa funders, which he has vowed not to disclose for reasons only known to himself. And no attempt at the Cosafa name change please. The region can’t afford a Nafaz-like circus simply to avoid creditors. Good luck Cosafa!