‘It won’t be business as usual’

Robson Sharuko Senior Sports Editor
Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Andrew Langa is confident that his team will deliver on its mandate to take domestic sport to another level characterised by development and success, in the next five years.
Addressing sports editors in Harare yesterday, while flanked by his deputy Tabetha Kanengoni-Malinga, Langa said it won’t be business as usual for sport in this country and administrators will be pressed to deliver for their constituencies in a grand scheme to take local sport to a successful level.

“I want to assure the nation that our team will definitely deliver,” Langa, who described himself as a football fanatic, said.
“We have been consulting with those fundis in cricket, those fundis in soccer. We have the zeal, the wish as a ministry to ensure that our people in Zimbabwe get what they want in sport.

“We want to move away from this thing of taking sport as entertainment but as something that can create employment and deliver food on the table for our athletes.

“I don’t think that we will fail the country.”
Langa said his ministry will ensure that Zimbabwean sport eliminates the cancer of match-fixing, which has been topical in this country since the explosion of the Asiagate scandal three years ago, and doping, which surfaced when a number of local schoolboy rugby players and Dynamos and Warriors midfielder, Devon Chafa, were caught off-side recently.

More importantly, said Langa, they will work to help the associations get the funding they desperately need and promised that, as from January next year, no representative national team will fail to fulfil its international assignments because of a shortage of funds.
Sport, said Langa, had not received the attention that it deserves in the past because it kept being dwarfed by the challenges in education, which took most of the attention of previous ministers, but now that they were a standalone sport, arts and culture ministry, he was confident that domestic sport was set to open a new chapter.

Zimbabwe will host the biennial African Union Sport Council Region Five Under-20 Youth Games in December 2014 in Bulawayo and the ministry is looking at raising US$46 million for the refurbishment of facilities and operational costs of staging the showcase.
Tomorrow the Council of Ministers in charge of Sport in Southern Africa are scheduled to meet in the City of Kings and Zimbabwe, through Langa, will assume the chairmanship of the Sport Development Region Five for the next two years, taking over from Zambia.

Zimbabwe will also assume the membership of the Bureau of the African Union Ministers of Sport, chairmanship of the region’s Troika on Sport made up of Zambia, Zimbabwe and Angola and the country will co-ordinate the secretariat and executive committee of the region on matters of sport development.

A Local Organising Committee of the African Union Sport Council Region Five Under-20 Youth Games has already been established and is headed by veteran sports administrator, Charles Dzimba, with Khonzani Ncube, the provincial administrator of Bulawayo, as his deputy while Henry Manzungu, a highly-regarded football and golf administrator, is the chief executive.

“My Ministry is working with the Office of the President and cabinet to set up an inter-ministerial/Cabinet Committee to oversee the preparations and the running of the Games as well as to keep the Government on the tag with developments and the state of the preparedness in the host city,” said Langa.

“Such a Committee will enable a co-ordinated and expeditious response from the different Ministries and their respective parastatals with regards to the effective hosting of these Games.

“Since Cabinet’s decision for the Games to be hosted in Bulawayo, the Ministry of Sport, Arts and Culture has engaged Treasury at officials level to verify and ascertain an infrastructure construction, rehabilitation and refurbishment budget with success.

“The requisite budget of US$46 million has been committed for infrastructure construction, refurbishment and rehabilitation.
“The Ministry intends to embark on a major fund-raising drive involving different parastatals and private businesses to support this initiative that will host more than 4 000 sportspeople, coaches and trainers.

“Needless to mention, the Games are expected to attract a wide range of local business operations and services.”
Langa, who revealed that he had met Zifa president Cuthbert Dube and chief executive, Jonathan Mashingaidze, also addressed the issue of match-fixing and doping.

“We will deal with match-fixing, doping etc using a legal unit within the Ministry. A feature of our sporting world, of late, has been the abuse of drugs and other illegal substances by our sportspersons,” said Langa.

“Zimbabwe is a signatory to the Unesco International Convention against Doping in Sport. The Convention represents the first time that governments around the world have agreed to apply the force of international law to anti-doping.

“Zimbabwe will participate in this Convention’s first ever conference on African soil in Pretoria, South Africa, as a bona-fide fully compliant member. Zimbabwe will be represented by the Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture and Dr (Nicholas) Munyonga, the head of the Zimbabwe Olympic Committee’s Medical Commission.

“It is important for Zimbabwe because we have, of late, been found on the wrong side of doping in sport in the codes of rugby and soccer. There is a lot for us to learn and implement as part of our sport development at all levels. It is my hope and prayer that the new focus on sport development will lead us to a new growth and support of the same.”

Addressing the journalists, Kanengoni-Malinga said her ministry will not just focus on the traditional major sporting disciplines like football, cricket and rugby but will look at also developing the rest of the disciplines that form the country’s sporting family. She said while her ministry acknowledged that most of the country’s sports association were being weighed down by debts, their focus was not on just clearing those debts, in the next five years, but ensuring that development was given due attention.