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Milton Nyamadzawo in JOHANNESBURG, South Africa
ZIMBABWEAN football has been stuck in a time warp, mainly due to a leadership that increasingly appears to be out of touch with reality.
Zifa has been dogged by perennial squabbles from lack of sponsorship, leadership incompetence, neglecting youth development programmes, weak governance and strategic planning bankruptcy.
Like decorated idiots with the twin tragedy of being mentally challenged, many of us bought into this fantasy and raised our expectations to unrealistic heights that our football will develop. Together we have failed football and our game is crying for leadership.
Lack of a Strategic Plan
What is the vision of Zifa? Good leaders have a well thought out (often written) mission describing the purpose of the organisation. That purpose needs to be clear and understandable.
Every employee should be able to identify with the mission and strive to achieve it. Ask anyone within the Zifa circles, what their mission is? It will always be difficult to get a clear understanding of what the Zifa mission is.
A vision needs to be abstract enough to encourage people to imagine it but concrete enough for followers to see it, understand it and be willing to climb on board to fulfill it.
Now we have a Zifa that is advocating for US$10 000 nomination fees, what has this amount got to do with leadership competence?
Acknowledgement of failure by the current Zifa board is the first step towards rehabilitation of our football.
The ultimate goal is the development of football in Zimbabwe and as such, it is critical that structures be put in place so that we can build a self-sustaining system. Now, four years down the line, the Zifa board is talking about putting a strategic plan in place, and one wonders, how has Zifa been operating for all these years without one in place?
The role of the Zifa Council
We have a Zifa council that is completely not in the clue about their terms of reference, the council should be the principals of Zifa but currently it is all in the clear that the board is supervising the council.
Administrative and technical capacity
Football is essentially about what happens on the pitch and that is the result. But how that result is attained, the process and methodology employed to get that result is pivotal.
African football is at its best time to harness on its assets and the partnership of all the important stakeholders is an invaluable asset on its own.
The turnover of administrators and technical staff in our league is a cause for concern and this presents a huge challenge in terms of capacity building.
Referees Development
It is an open secret that our referees are operating in a poisoned environment, and some of the decisions of our match officials are atrocious and since these referees are key actors in the development of our game, more needs to be done to ensure that fans do not pay to “watch delayed matches”.
A referees review committee needs to be adopted and those match officials plucked from hell would have to be stood down in future matches.
Bizarrely, incompetence has been immensely rewarded and corruption has been embraced with open arms. Some of our referees who are incompetent continue to be favoured with match appointments.
Sponsorship and Revenue generation
South African football is massively sponsored. The South African Premier Soccer League is the seventh best funded league in the world. It is supported by ABSA, SAB Miller, Supersport and a number of other banks and corporates, whose donations together amount to about US$300 million over a five year period from 2007.
One of the main problems with sponsorship in African football is that the sector lacks accountability and transparency in income and expenditure.
The current Zifa board promised that it will bring in a lot of sponsorship from the corporate world. But, as we have clearly seen, no sponsor has come on board to partner them.
We need to instutionalise the System of Accountability in which every cash-flow into the league or association is effectively monitored by an appointed, credible, and neutral “watch-dog” that is empowered to investigate, recover any misappropriated funds and prosecute any erring administrators, officials or other personnel.
This is a proven way to raise confidence by the various stakeholders and, more importantly, the sponsors/investors will also be lured given they know every cent they put in will go for its intended purpose.
Governance
One thinks of good governance as a comprehensive expression that includes making the full range of organisational activities legal, fair, transparent, accountable, reasonable, responsible and ethical, to the benefit of all strategic partners and stakeholders. It has both legislative and ethical-compliance components.
Although good governance has become a buzzword in all spheres of the community, it is not uncommon to observe that Zifa misuse this expression to comply with it more in form than in substance, in their quest to achieve narrow interests.
Zifa, in particular, still treats good governance as both a burden and an intrusion into its established prerogatives of power, privilege, purse and space.
Zifa is a completely closed oligarchy, which is the perfect form for mischief and we have watched enough of that horror since March 27 2010.
Youth Development Structures
The uncomfortable truth is, Zimbabwe does not have quality players to compete at the highest level because of insufficient solid development structures at the grass roots level.
It is a fact that our players are poorly developed.
How many 16 year-old players are competing regularly in the Premier Soccer League? The answer is zero because Zifa never had any interest in developing our youth structures despite being paid US$250 000 by Fifa yearly principally for such purposes.
The Media And The Role It Hasn’t Played
We have an electronic and print media that has failed the nation in glorifying Zifa when they were supposed to bring the association to account for its failures to take our game forward.
Because of that, the Zifa board members have been put into a comfort zone, pampered in the media as people who have done very well when the reality is that they have terribly failed to execute their role to develop our football and make our national teams competitive.
Potential challengers, who dream of one day becoming Zifa leaders, like Leslie Gwindi, are hounded and threatened with sanctions, in the name of defending sponsors, just a few months before the elections.
Gwindi’s crime is that he criticised the sponsorship package of the Premiership but in the past few days we have also heard the Dynamos chairman, Kenny Mubaiwa, saying exactly that when he described the PSL as a “league that is sponsored so poorly.”
If the media was playing its correct role, Zifa would have been held accountable for not producing audited financial statements, which is required by law under the Sports Commission Act, we would not have had six Warriors coaches, in less than four years under this leadership and our football would have been in better health.
Milton Nyamadzawo is the former manager of Mwana Africa Football Club and writes in his personal capacity. He can be contacted at [email protected] <mailto:[email protected]>
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