No more ducking and diving Mash!

THERE comes a time when it becomes impossible to keep going under the table, getting out and going under the chair, then out, or even hiding behind the door. When the centre cannot hold, the time for ducking and diving will be up and what is expected under normal circumstances is for honourable men and women in such a situation to throw in the towel.

But we are not dealing with a normal situation here or a normal creature, we are dealing with football people who believe accepting that they have failed to run office is taboo. There are few football men who have raised their hands and said “I quit to allow fresh brains”. In fact, those who have resigned from leadership positions in football have done so after sharp differences with their colleagues, largely personal differences.

The tragedy of all of this is that we have come to accept the foolish cliché that football is a beautiful game run by thugs. That is what you hear the world over, by why should we allow thugs to run the people’s sport? That is why allegations of vote buying, misappropriation of funds and favouritism when it comes to recruitment of coaches and players takes centre stage, simply because we have come to accept that football is not for the faint hearted, or honest people.

I do not envy the position that Zifa president Cuthbert Dube finds himself in, but why the concern, he chose to be there. He canvassed for votes and got re-elected. But the man is certainly under fire from all directions, his house is burning, no doubt about that. Zifa property is being auctioned over debts, some which could have been avoided like labour related cases, day in day out, and now what is in line to be auctioned are the actual buildings that some men and women who ran the sport a long time ago worked hard to acquire in Bulawayo and Harare.

The preoccupation of Dube and his board since he came into office in 2010 has been the Zifa Village project and cleaning the game of the much talked about Asiagate. And it was going well. You have to give credit where it is due. At the Zifa Village, the front office, catering facilities and accommodation facilities were all put in place and a conference centre also built. While the Warriors were firing blanks on the field of play, failing to qualify for any major continental or international tournament after the last two appearances at the Nations Cup finals in 2004 and 2006, there was some ray of sunshine coming from the Zifa Village, something which Dube has been proud of, and even having the luxury of hosting Fifa president Sepp Blatter, but all that has now come to naught.

All that has now come to naught because the property inside the Zifa Village, including a tractor and the artificial turf which had made the pitch for national teams to train, has all been auctioned over debts owed to various former employees and service providers. While times are hard for everyone, you get a feeling that there is lack of corporate governance at Zifa, because how does an association keep on accumulating debts when it has no resources to pay. What kind of an association has no friends? The argument from Zifa has been that the government should chip in and fund football, fair and fine, but which other friends has Zifa managed to bring to the table to help them out of the mess? There is possibly none, except Buymore Investments, a company owned by the association’s president, and what is clear as the sun will rise tomorrow is that either Dube or Buymore Investment’s pockets have a bottom, and that is why the association is sitting on a debt of over $4 million, and you never know the actual figure, because figures keep on changing, depending on who you want to believe.

There were calls recently to have the Zifa board dissolved, which meant primarily getting Dube out of the helm of the association, but that did not go anywhere as Zifa fought back, menacingly and hard enough, calling all those who wanted change at Zifa enemies of football. That was the message from Zifa chief executive officer Jonathan Mashingaidze, an interesting character who has an answer for everything and for everyone, and he has managed to use his skills to shield his boss from missiles thrown at him. But for how long?

From the look of things, Mashingaidze is the man who should do the honourable thing and resign because his office was receiving communication from Fifa all along for the past three or so years concerning the Valinhos issue, unless Fifa were in communication with someone else. How and why Mashingaidze and his bosses decided to ignore the red flag from Fifa is shocking. And you understand the anger from Fifa, they have suspended the country from the 2018 World Cup because the national association did not pay former national team coach José Claudinei Georgini, better known as Valinhos of Brazil who joined the Warriors as head coach in 2008. He was fired before his contract was up after unsatisfactory results, and is owed $60,000. After getting no joy from Zifa, he approached the world football governing body who ruled in August 2012 that he should be paid.

If you read carefully the statement from Fifa, you get a feeling that someone was sleeping on duty, because when Fifa says pay, they know you can afford the amount because each member association receives a yearly grant from Fifa, and if you take into account that just after the Brazil World Cup each member association was given $250,000 as bonus, you can safely say Zifa gets far more than that each year, and what poor Zifa should have done is simply to advise Fifa to deduct Valinhos’s dues from the grant. As simple as all that!

Now that the country has been sanctioned and shamed before the whole world, Mashingaidze can not claim to be the best man for the job, simply because we have hit our all time low, and neither can Dube claim to be the best brains around to run our football, despite his personal sacrifices in terms of using his own money to oil the Zifa machinery time and again. Even former Warriors player and coach, Bruce Grobbelaar believes its time the Zifa board was shown the door, and of course, they go with their CEO.

“I think Zifa needs to be dissolved and the organisation started again from scratch. But how can that happen? Governments cannot interfere in football matters — Fifa suspends countries for that. The new Zifa would need to be an independent organisation, but who is going to set that up? There are too many hands in the pot of money that comes from Fifa. It would need a strong individual that everyone knows in Zimbabwe,” Grobbelaar was quoted as saying by BBC, although he got it wrong on one point claiming that the government gets part of the money given to Zifa by Fifa.

Information Minister Professor Jonathan Moyo summed it up when he said: “This is the smoking gun that should be used to bring the needed change at the helm of Zifa”.

Deputy Sports Minister Tabeth Kanengoni Malinga also said the same thing, after hinting a few weeks ago that government would dissolve Zifa. If you go to the streets and ask anyone, you will get the same message, heads must roll at Zifa. The image of the two principal men at Zifa has been soiled and the country can not risk going forward with them. Football is a people’s sport, and when people say those in leadership should leave they are not asking them to leave their homes or wives, they are simply asking them to pay way to new ideas to run the people’s sport. It’s nothing personal.

For comments and contributions email [email protected]. You can also follow this writer on Twitter and Facebook.