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Petros Kausiyo Deputy Sports Editor
CASH-STRAPPED Zifa have welcomed with huge relief government’s commitment to assisting the Warriors with the troubled association yesterday expressing optimism that the State’s intervention would help the senior team to remain focused on their 2014 African Nations Championship campaign.
Sport, Arts and Culture Minister Andrew Langa revealed government’s commitment to ensuring that the Warriors’ preparations are not distracted by the kind of problems such as the food shortage they faced on Wednesday night and said his ministry was working on ways to assisting the country’s flagship team. Zifa, saddled by a crippling debt of over US$4 million, have been struggling to ensure the Warriors and other national teams are well serviced in order to meet their international obligations.
The association’s financial problems sunk to new depths on Wednesday when coach Ian Gorowa was forced to buy food for the players after Zifa had failed to pay for their meals.
Gorowa’s men, who will play Morocco in their opening CHAN assignment in Cape Town on January 12, are also pencilled in to fine-tune their preparations with a date against Libya at the National Sports Stadium on January 4 before they clash against Gabon in Johannesburg three days later.
Despite securing a kit deal from British sportswear company Umbro, the Warriors’ training camp got off to a slow start because of logistical problems associated with Zifa’s financial woes and these culminated in the food crisis that hit their camp on Wednesday night. Langa said it was regrettable that the coach had end up buying food for the Warriors and indicted that measures were being put in place to avert a recurrence of a similar crisis.
“As Government we would like to say that it’s unfortunate that we had an incident where the national coach Ian Gorowa ended up feeding the Warriors.
“While we are facing some challenges as a nation there is no way that this should be allowed to come to a situation where we end up with the national coach having to buy food for the national team players.
“I have been in touch with Zifa and the Sports Commission discussing this issue and measures will be put in place to ensure that does not happen again. I want to assure the nation our team will definitely deliver,’’ Langa said.
Zifa yesterday embraced with great relief the minister’s commitment to assisting the Warriors who will be making their third successive appearance at the CHAN tournament that is reserved for homebased talent around the continent.
In welcoming Langa’s commitment to helping the Warriors, Zifa chief executive Jonathan Mashingaidze, also made a passionate appeal to the corporate sector to assist the national team insisting that “CHAN squad is a responsibility of every soccer-loving Zimbabwean’’. Zifa, Mashingaidze also said, would remain heavily indebted to their president Cuthbert Dube who has been single-handedly bankrolling their operations and paying for Gorowa’s salaries from his personal resources.“As a family of football we are more than happy to hear the commitment coming from the Minister. Over the last few years the association has been walking alone with no-one coming to complement yet we have always said national teams are the country’s ambassadors and their international commitments require collective efforts and support.
“The Warriors are not sorely the responsibility of Jonathan Mashingaidze or Cuthbert Dube because they represent us as a nation so we feel so relieved and optimistic when the Minister pledged government assistance.
“Instead of coming in to help us some other people have chosen to ridicule Zifa and the Warriors but the world over no association can afford to fund the flagship team on its own as their commitments involve a lot of flying across the continent and various other commitments. “So the statement by Minister Langa is also most welcome in that it indicates government’s commitment to the Warriors as the flagship team. We would have loved that government support to start from the qualifiers because in other countries the national teams are funded by their governments and corporate companies from the qualifying stages. “In our case it was Dr Dube who had to do it all alone and this is not sustainable and like he has always said this is a national responsibility that requires the corporate world to also step up to the plate. Funding national teams’ activities does not come cheap.
“We understand that government has got many challenges and they are faced with a lot of requests for service delivery and that is why the corporate world needs to go a rung up because the Warriors need incentives as well apart from food and accommodation,’’ said Mashingaidze. Mashingaidze said they had since sealed agreements with the football associations of Libya and Gabon for the two warm matches which the Warriors will play against their respective teams in Harare and Johannesburg.
Online Reporter