Mboma hails Zifa boss on Asiagate

the deep divisions in its ranks and this had a huge bearing in the Warriors’ failure to qualify for the 2013 Nations Cup finals.
The Harare businessman, speaking shortly after the Zifa Independent Ethics Committee presented their Asiagate report to the board members of the local football controlling body, saluted Zifa president, Cuthbert Dube, for his major house-cleaning exercise.
“As ZNSSA, today we stand hand-in-hand with Zifa, especially its president Cuthbert Dube, in embracing the dawn of a new era in our football following the completion of the enquiry into the Asiagate scandal,” said Nyatanga.
“We acknowledge that it hasn’t been an easy assignment and a lot of effort has been put into the exercise to try and clean our house so that we can weed out elements that were holding back our march to success.
“Obviously, we feel for the players who have been caught in the crossfire and we believe that the Zifa president and his board will exercise their leniency, in many cases involving our young boys, and find their heart to pardon them rather than ban them.
“We had taken a back seat, as an organisation, in the football affairs of our country because we always felt that until this Asiagate monster is dealt with, there was very little else that we could do to make a meaningful contribution.
“Now that the report is out, finally, we want to thank members of the Independent Ethics Committee for all the months they put in trying to get to the bottom of this scandal and ensure that those who were innocent would be cleared and those who were guilty would be punished.
“We believe that, now, we can move forward as one family and that is why today we are calling on everyone to bury their differences and work for the good of our national game and, for that to happen, we need to respect and work together with those who were elected to be on the Zifa board.”
Nyatanga said ZNNSA had also realised they were wrong to pick some petty fights with the Zifa board on issues that they could have dealt with inside the boardroom walls.
ZNSSA officials went to parliament a few months ago and laid a number of accusations on the Zifa board.
“When we look back we find that we were a bit naïve because we could have done things differently and we could have sought a meeting with the Zifa president and discussed whatever concerns we had,” said Nyatanga.
“We are not super humans and we make our mistakes but what is crucial is that we realised we made that mistake and we should have treated the Zifa boss in a better way given all the sacrifice, especially financially, which he has done for our game.
“We are all taught, from a very young age, to respect our leaders and we lacked respect that time and our message to Dube is that we are part of his big family and, as the father, he needs to have the conscience to forgive us when we err.
“That is what leadership is all about and football, by its nature, is a very emotional game and a lot of things happen and a lot of things are said but it doesn’t mean they are all true every time.
“We can’t continue living in a deeply divided society when we should be one happy big family and that is why we believe the time has come, as we turn our backs on Asiagate, for us to unite and work for one cause — the success of our national game.”
Nyatanga said the failure by the Warriors to qualify for the 2013 Nations Cup finals was a huge disappointment but this wasn’t the time to throw out both the baby and the bath water.
Needing to defend a 3-1 lead from the first leg, the Warriors came short in Luanda and conceded two early goals, to surrender the advantage, and lost the tie 0-2 to crash out on the away goals rule.
“We all felt the pain because we were so sure that we were going to have a very good time in South Africa come next year,” said Nyatanga.
“But such disappointments happen in football and we can’t burn the entire house because we have failed to qualify, especially given a background where we have qualified just twice in the last 32 years.
“We have to pick some tough lessons from our failure and it’s up to the leaders to make sure that they implement whatever they learnt during the campaign so that we will be better off when we compete again in the World Cup qualifier next year.
“We have always believed that qualification would be a bonus given that we have been operating in an atmosphere that has been poisonous and we should be happy that we reached this far and curse our luck that we just couldn’t make it over the line.
“We are of the view that we should start building a new team, which has the ‘keeper Ariel Sibanda, Musona, Billiat, Gutu, Mukamba and Zvasiya as the only survivors from the team that played in Angola and we bring in a lot of the boys who are Under-20.
“Even if we lose we would be building a team for the future and you can see that we will have a formidable side.
“Let’s take out the emotions and leave all these calls for this and that person to resign because changing the people, which we have done quite a lot in the past, will not change anything.”
Nyatanga said the ZNSSA executive will meet in Harare tomorrow to discuss the latest developments in the national game and they are expected to come out with resolutions that will see them building bridges with a number of administrative arms of domestic football.