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Sharuko on Saturday
THE first ZIFA elections I attended was in 1993 – the Dream Team party was well and truly underway, Reinhard Fabisch was weaving his magic and the Warriors were in cruise control.
Leo Mugabe won the ZIFA poll in ’93.
He replaced Trevor Carelse-Juul, a businessman who, at one point in his life, had coached Dynamos to the league championship.
Even though I was just a rookie journalist, and the youngest man in that room where the poll was held, there are some things I saw that day which didn’t appeal to my conscience.
It quickly dawned on me that the ZIFA elections are pregnant with dark arts and many votes can be sold to the highest bidder and many votes can be bought.
And, on that big day, I noted that the voters appeared to have been injected with a substance which made them allergic to anything associated with integrity.
I had just completed my first year in this job and I was a rookie in the company of legends of the industry – Sam Marisa, a gentle giant, Phillip Magwaza, Assel Gwekwerere, to name but a few.
All these colleagues are now late.
Sam had warned me that the ZIFA elections are as much a political minefield like the national elections and he was very right.
This was very ugly stuff, it wasn’t what had attracted me to the beautiful game and I resisted an invitation to attend the next ZIFA polls where Leo was retained as leader during his decade-long stay as the game’s leader.
I didn’t attend the poll where Rafik Khan won the ZIFA chairmanship and neither did I attend the one where Wellington Nyatanga replaced him and where Cuthbert Dube turned himself into a president.
I wasn’t there when Dube was retained, despite all the controversy that he was earning a cool US$500 000 a month.
And, neither was I there when Philip Chiyangwa won the presidency or when Felton Kamambo won a protest vote in which it wasn’t about his suitability to the job but the voters’ decision to deny Fidza a second term.
However, on Saturday, for the first time in 22 years, I decided the time had come for me to return and be a witness to the ZIFA elections.
I had this feeling that this election would be different.
That it would mark the end of an era for some traditional kingmakers, was going to usher in a new breed of leaders, including some young men and women who could breathe fresh air into the game.
Of course, some of the old shenanigans remain and I concluded that they will never end at ZIFA, at SAFA, at COSAFA, at CAF and even at FIFA itself because they are part of the DNA of this game.
Football is a very dirty game.
That explains why many of the game’s leading figures ended up being sucked into the FIFA scandal of 2015 when it was established that over US$150 million had been tainted by bribery, fraud and money laundering.
The bribes amounted to US$110 million.
And, we had key figures in the game’s value chain like Alejandro Burzaco pleading guilty and committing to forfeit US$21,6 million, Jeffrey Webb forfeiting US$6,7 million and Jose Margulies forfeiting US$9,2 million.
And, even up to now, a decade after the scandal exploded, we don’t even know what the US$10 million, which SAFA paid CONCACAF, was for amid fears that it ended up in the pockets of Jack Warner and his lieutenants.
The good thing is that there will always be some good people out there willing to fight such levels of corruption in the game.
And, that is the reason why the FIFA Scandal exploded in 2015 and, in a way, played a big part in overthrowing Sepp Blatter from his post as president.
ZIFA, THE PRINCE, THE LANDSLIDE WIN
When I arrived at the Rainbow Hotel for the ZIFA elections on Saturday, the first thing I detected was that it did not have the tension which I had seen when I was at such a poll two decades ago.
There were a lot of people who were smiling, it was like they were setting the stage for a coronation, and not an election, and their body language appeared to suggest that the voters were united in whatever they wanted to do.
My sources had correctly told me Magwizi was winning by the biggest landslide since the council of voters was expanded to have more than 50 members in 2014.
They had correctly told me that the ZIFA executive was going to have some fresh faces, including some below the age of 40, and that the former players had no chance, whatsoever, to make an impression.
Magwizi had spoken to me on the very first day he decided he wanted to have a crack at the ZIFA presidency – we met at his friend’s house in Mount Pleasant and he laid out his vision.
He also spoke to me for about an hour or so at Alex Sports Club one night, telling me how his campaign was going, the hurdles he was facing and how he intended to leap over them.
The bulk of other candidates also met me and told me their vision.
But that was before ZIFA confirmed who had been cleared to run for the ZIFA presidency and who had failed to meet the criteria.
I never met Magwizi, or any of his fellow candidates, after they had been confirmed as the men who would contest for the ZIFA presidency.
I felt it was not right to meet any of them because, given they had already sold me their vision, this was their race to run and I didn’t want to have anything to do with their campaign whatsoever.
However, in the weeks that followed the confirmation of the identity of the candidates, I had this feeling that Magwizi was not only going to win this poll but was also going to win with a landslide.
Even before Wicknell came up with his offer to give ZIFA US$10 million and to give the councillors cars, should they vote for Magwizi and he wins the poll, I had this feeling that he was going to win – and quite comfortably, too.
He would probably not have won 61 or the 72 votes cast but he still would have won this poll by a country mile and would have clocked the two thirds majority in the first round for him to be ZIFA president.
What we can’t deny is that this was a different ZIFA election.
This was a ZIFA election in which, battered and bruised by the mistakes of the past which included a suspension from FIFA, the mood among the voters was that there was a need for a fresh face to lead the game.
Someone from outside the inner circle of the politics of local football, free from the baggage of its grim past, the burden of its soiled history, the mistakes which have been made and the cocktail of bad experiments which have been made.
This was a ZIFA election which was fueled by change.
A wave of change to try something different, to try someone who has not been involved in the structures of the domestic football’s game before and who did not look like the kind of guy who will come and steal the association’s money.
Someone whose conscience would always be his biggest moral compass.
Someone who would be afraid to be caught in a web of negative headlines because his failure would inevitably draw the names of some important people, whom he associates with, into his maze of failure.
Someone who knows the value of a good name and a good profile and, more importantly, whose association with the game, even from a distance, had already resulted in positive impacts at Dynamos and Highlanders.
This was a revolution, something we have never seen before in this game, and Magwizi rode on the wave in a time and place where the password to the ZIFA presidency was a simple word called CHANGE.
After the scars inflicted by the FIFA suspension, Magwizi was at the right time and right place to provide the alternative leadership, and the alternative fresh face, which our football was crying out for.
If I was a Councillor I would have voted for Twine Phiri because he is someone I have known for a very long time but at the same time my conscience would have told me that the best man ultimately won.
It feels like ZIFA has found its Prince Charming – he has the poise of a leader, he speaks like a true leader and his decision to invite those who lost the poll to the dinner where his victory was celebrated on Saturday showed that he is a good man.
Let’s give him a chance, he didn’t rise to occupy all those senior posts in different fields by chance, he went to various universities to acquire the knowledge to be in those roles.
We are coming from having a ZIFA boss who told us that 32 million 500 million Zimbabwe dollars had been allocated to women’s football.
A ZIFA boss who told us that the new Warriors coach he had hired had coached in “many continents in Zimbabwe.”
There is nowhere, even in the worst case scenario, that Magwizi cannot be better than that.
To God be the Glory!
Peace to the GEPA Chief, the Big Fish, George Norton, Daily Service, Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and all the Chakariboys still in the struggle. Come on Warriors!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Khamaldhinoooooooooooooooooo!
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