Vusumuzi Dube
Tadious Manyepo, Sports Reporter
ZIFA Normalisation Committee chairperson Lincoln Mutasa has been urged to resign after he bewildered froze before the Parliamentary Committee on Sport, Arts, Culture and Recreation yesterday.
As has been characteristic of his extended one-year tenure at the helm of the ZIFA NC, Mutasa was inconsistent and seemingly embarrassingly clueless when responding to pertinent governance issues posed to him by members of the committee.
It was tragi-comedy with Mutasa surprisingly appearing out of touch with the very issues his committee is mandated to address.
He even shamelessly revealed that he has never been to any local Premier Soccer League match for the past 13 months he has been leading the out-of-sorts organisation.
His colleague Nyasha Sanyamandwe and the motherbody’s chief executive officer Yvonne Manwa-Mapika equally displayed ignorance with the latter even failing to name a single player from Northern Region Soccer League top sides Black Rhinos and Scottland after she claimed to have recently watched their game.
And shocked members of the committee led by chairperson Chamu Chiwanza advised Mutasa to consider leaving the post to which his mandate was recently stretched to January 2025.
“As a committee there is no better way to describe the catastrophe and disaster we saw today, coming from the Zifa Normalisation Committee who are clueless to what is football, not even how to run it but they are even clueless of what football is from the secretary-general to legal director in charge and we are very much concerned as a committee that we are in this situation,” said Chiwanza.
“We all know that Zimbabweans are football crazy people, they love football and our President (President Mnangagwa) is doing massive work to see that our Zimbabweans are happy and we cannot allow people to run down our football or be a sideshow to the progress that is happening towards Vision 2030 in this country.
“Football is going to make a pivotal role in ensuring that people are living better lives and are happy. So we cannot allow our football to be run by clueless individuals with selfish agendas in this country.
“We call upon the chairman of the Zifa Normalisation Committee to put in his resignation with immediate effect. He is not in football, he has never attended local football match, he said this in front of our committee and he has no idea. He has been in football long back when he was in his playing days and none of the committee members except for Rosemary Mugadza who was in women football is familiar with what football is.
“We are not going to force him (Mutasa) to resign but we are concerned and it’s a normalisation committee, they should normalise our football, they have been in office for more than a year and degradation and decay in football is getting worse by each day. So they can’t keep holding on to the parameters of football, yet they are destroying our football and us as parliamentarians can’t just stand aside and watch, we will speak.”
Herentals College president and striker Innocent Benza, who is also part of the committee said it was worrying to see football being led by such ignorant individuals.
“The lack of interest in football from someone claiming to be a Zifa normalisation committee chairman, the lack of knowledge is also worrisome, also the Zifa committee represented here, lacked the basic knowledge of football,” said Benza.
ZIFA is expected to re-appear before the same committee on a date to be advised after yesterday’s facade failed to reap the desired fruits with Mutasa, Manwa-Mapika and Sanyamandwe failing to come to the party on the oral evidence session.
Online Reporter