Zifa should take time to learn from Zambia’s success story

first team had been wiped out in a plane crash off the coast of Gabon, has Zambian football reached such dizzy heights.
With the Warriors having failed to qualify for the 2012 Nations Cup finals, a good number of Zimbabweans have adopted Chipolopolo as their team at this tournament and they have revelled in the majestic performance of the Zambians.
We have always shared a bond with the Zambians, eternally connected to each other by the majesty of the Victoria Falls and the charm of the Zambezi River, and we have shared their high moments and shed tears with them when that plane crash decimated their national team.
That is the reason why Zimbabweans celebrated wildly on Wednesday night as Chipolopolo coasted to their finest hour and that is why their success was splashed on the back page of all the mainstream newspapers in this country, dwarfing the Asiagate scandal into the inside pages.
Virtually all the Zimbabweans will be rooting for Zambia’s success in Sunday’s final in Gabon.
Zambia’s march, into the final of the Nations Cup, provides a number of lessons for Zimbabwe.
While the Zambians have been flying, as a football nation, we remain trapped in a quagmire of mediocrity, weighed down by crippling administrative shortcomings and haunted by a poisonous operating environment where the game’s interests are usually sacrificed for personal causes.
The Zambian Premiership is screened live on SuperSport, which has enhanced its brand as attractive to the sponsors, while our domestic Premiership is ignored by ZBC who can’t even screen highlights of the action from our football fields.
When a momentum was gained last year, in the battle to take our domestic Premiership onto the SuperSport bouquet, the in-fighting started as a row between the Premier Soccer League leaders and Malawian sports consultant, Felix Sapao, derailed the bid.
The leader of the Football Association of Zambia, Kalusha Bwalya, is a legend who played the game at the highest level at Dutch giants PSV Eindhoven and remains the only player from Southern Africa to be crowned the African Footballer of the Year.
During a lengthy professional club career in Europe, Kalusha learnt the dynamics of management and, as leader of the national team, he learnt a lot – during his battles for his country – about the best possible conditions that could be created to stimulate national team players to go the extra mile in defence of their country.
Having coached the national team, upon his retirement, Kalusha understands the challenges that go with coaching Chipolopolo and when he makes a decision, on the best possible coach who should take charge of the team, it is based on expert knowledge of the environment that the coach would be operating in.
When Italian coach, Dario Bonetti, helped Zambia qualify for the 2012 Nations Cup finals, Kalusha still felt that wasn’t enough because the team was lacking a certain cutting edge, in terms of its technical awareness, and the prospects of doing well at the finals were minimal.
So Kalusha wielded the axe and brought back Frenchman Herve Renard, who had taken Chipolopolo to the quarter-finals at the 2010 Nations Cup finals, before leaving after having been enticed by a more lucrative offer to take change of Angola.
Kalusha risked his reputation, by axing Bonetti and bringing back Renard, but he had the technical backing – accrued from years as a player at the top level of the game, leader of Chipolopolo and, crucially, as coach of the same national team – to believe in himself.
The results are there for all to see.
Our football leadership clearly lacks a man like Kalusha Bwalya, to lead it using experience gained as a player at the top level of football, priceless knowledge gained from captaining the national team and technical expertise gained from coaching the national team.
With all due respect to Cuthbert Dube, the Zifa president doesn’t have half the football CV that Kalusha Bwalya has and some of his board’s decisions, especially those related to the national team, have been something close to a circus.
Kalusha took full control of Chipolopolo and, in the process, he attracted the wrath of some of his FAZ executive members who accused him of dictatorship and even broke away to form a rebel union that failed to get the recognition of Fifa.
Dube, in contrast, has failed to impose his authority on the Warriors and, in the two years that he has been in charge, we have seen the team being coached by Norman Mapeza, Madinda Ndlovu and now Rahman Gumbo with Mapeza having had two stints in charge of the team within that short period.
When the Zambians came here for the 2009 Cosafa Senior Challenge, they brought some of the players they were earmarking for the 2012 Nations Cup finals and, although we beat them 3-1 in the final, their mission had been fulfilled.
When we had an opportunity to send a development side to CHAN last year, we created all sorts of chaos in the technical team and, in the end, Mapeza quit and Madinda took a team, which had more players coming to the end of their international careers than the beginning, and we achieved nothing in falling in the first round.
We cannot hide behind Asiagate forever because in Zambia they have six players, who were exposed to Wilson Raj Perumal in Finland and were tried and found guilty of match-fixing, which gives an indication that the Singaporean had also spread his wings across the Zambezi.
But the Zambians, unlike us, found a way to move forward while we remain trapped in a never-ending crisis that is now likely to destroy even our hopes of qualifying for the 2013 Nations Cup finals in South Africa and 2014 World Cup finals in Brazil.
As we celebrate Chipolopolo’s finest hour, let’s take stock of our national game and we will see that we have the players to match the Zambians, without a doubt, but what we lack is the leadership that can turn those players into champions on the continent.