Stakeholders meet over constitution

Petros Kausiyo

ZIFA’s Normalisation Committee and the football association’s Congress will today finally get a chance to meet under one roof for the first time, more than a year after Lincoln Mutasa’s leadership was ushered in on a FIFA mandate.

Although the Normalisation Committee have over the past year met with some of ZIFA’s members in their clusters, they had not met with the entire Congress under one roof.

Today, they will meet with the Congress for a vital indaba that effectively opens the ZIFA election season, as the councillors will discuss with the Normalisation Committee amendments that have been proposed for the ZIFA constitution.

FIFA mandated the Normalisation Committee to review the ZIFA constitution before elections for a new and substantive board are held.

It is against this background that FIFA have also dispatched their senior Member Associations Governance Services Manager Ahmed Harraz to Harare to provide guidance in today’s deliberations.

ZIFA chief executive Yvonne Mapika Manwa said yesterday that her office had last month circulated to members copies of the draft of the amended constitution.

“We sent all members of the Congress copies of the draft of the proposed amendments to the constitution so that they could go through and make their comments and suggestions.

“So, this meeting will discuss those proposed amendments with the hope that we will then come up with the final draft which the same Congress would then need to meet and ratify before it sent to FIFA for approval,” Manwa said.

Both the Sports and Recreation Commission and ZIFA are cognisant that some of football’s perennial rabble rousers might want to throw spanners in the works, but there seems to be a renewed commitment by the parties to ensure the association’s elections are held.

Sports Commission board chairman Gerald Mlotshwa told the media during a signing ceremony of a collaborative Memorandum of Understanding between the SRC and ZIFA that the sport regulatory body would play their role to ensure a transparent and fair electoral process at the association.

“SRC will not interfere with the ZIFA elections, but will ensure that there is a conducive environment for the staging of the elections,” Mlotshwa said.

Mutasa also added that his committee were taking it on a step-by-step basis to ensure that ZIFA are fully compliant with both the national and FIFA laws by the time members of Congress go to the polls.

And today will mark the first major step towards that goal.

“We cannot talk about elections before we are compliant as ZIFA with respect to our financial accounts and the statutes.

“Within the coming days we will update Congress on how we want to progress and they will give us their feedback starting tomorrow, but I cannot pre-empt the discussions.

“After this (today’s meeting) we will have an AGM to ratify the amended constitution and then we will call for an elective assembly to choose the new ZIFA board,” Mutasa said.

He added that ZIFA were currently operating on the constitution that was last amended in 2013 and that the process to amend the constitution has started way back during Felton Kamambo’s era and proposed by the same Congress that will debate it today and push it towards its finality.

Mutasa also hinted on some of the proposed clauses in the amended constitution.

“FIFA want the new constitution to have greater women representation in the assembly as there is a realisation by FIFA of the significant role women’s football now plays even in revenue generation for FIFA,” he said.

The Normalisation Committee boss said he was unfazed by some efforts to try and derail the staging of today’s meeting and the scheduled October 18 annual meeting.

Mutasa remains hopeful that his committee will meet the January 2025 deadline set by FIFA by which they should have successfully conducted ZIFA elections.

With the Normalisation Committee providing the platform, it is now incumbent on the ZIFA Congress members to have their say on the constitution.