Online Reporter
Stanford Chiwanga, Quality Editor
WHEN Pieter De Jongh, the self-proclaimed tactical titan, arrived to take the reins at Highlanders, he did so with the usual bombast and a sweeping, arrogant assessment of the squad he inherited. His recent venomous critique — that a sizeable chunk of the Bosso dressing room is simply “not good enough”— would have carried weight had his own results not been a devastating indictment of his limitations.
The simple, unvarnished truth staring the Black and White army in the face is this: the emperor has no wins. De Jongh’s brief, miserable tenure at Barbourfields has been a masterclass in deflection and underachievement. He inherited a struggling team, yes, but he has done absolutely nothing to improve it. In fact, his arrival has been marked by a staggering level of mediocrity that has only served to expose his high-voltage rhetoric as nothing more than hot air.
His record speaks louder than his excuses. One solitary league win — a slender 0-1 victory away to Bikita Minerals — is all he can boast. At Barbourfields, the fortress that should intimidate opponents, he failed to win a single league match. His only taste of victory at home came not through tactical brilliance, but via the lottery of a penalty shootout against Scottland in the Chibuku Super Cup quarter-finals. That is not progress; that is survival by chance.
The painful irony is that his assistant, Try Ncube, managed to secure a single, respectable league win as interim coach following the dismissal of Kelvin Kaindu. De Jongh’s overall impact, numerically, is barely distinguishable from that of a temporary stop-gap, yet he speaks with the authority of a league champion. The most audacious part of his blame-laying exercise is his insistence on pinning the club’s struggles —specifically poor recruitment — on his predecessor, Kelvin Kaindu. This attempt at historical revisionism is intellectually dishonest and factually incorrect.
Let the final league standings speak: of the seven league victories that Highlanders secured this past turbulent season, a remarkable five were achieved under the stewardship of Kelvin Kaindu. Kaindu, the man De Jongh claims left a mess, did not just win matches; he provided the essential survival foundation. It was his effort that kept the team from the catastrophic plunge into the relegation zone, a fact underlined by his subsequent, highly praised achievement of taking over Dynamos and steering them clear of their own relegation crisis. De Jongh is complaining about the quality of the wood while standing in a house built by the carpenter he is now savaging.
The sole signing that registered any meaningful impact — Nigerian forward Benjamin Oluwarotimi Adeogun — was, tellingly, a club initiative, robbing De Jongh of any right to claim success. Conversely, the trio of players he foisted upon the squad — Learnmore Muyambo, Atusaye Nyondo and Martin Nhubu — represent an exercise in monumental futility. They are his tactical progeny, and their collective value remains brutally negligible, having added precisely nothing to the desperate state of the attack or the porous defence.
Muyambo’s Chibuku Cup goal against Scottland is the pathetic epitaph of his disastrous recruitment drive. De Jongh has introduced no fresh tactical doctrine, established no culture of victory, and his result sheet is a void. His sole contribution to Highlanders has been a toxic, cynical, and self-serving campaign of public denigration, aimed at shielding his own incompetence by blaming the very players his leadership has utterly broken.
If truth be told, the rot at Highlanders emanates not from a lack of player quality, but from a terminal shortage of effective coaching and accountability at the very top of the technical bench. The coach who has won practically nothing since taking charge should spend less time tearing into his squad and more time staring long and hard into the mirror. For a club the stature of Highlanders, this is not just disappointing — it is an utter humiliation.
