Dingilizwe Ntuli
IS the time right for former soccer players to become involved in the running of the game in the country? There has been a lot of talk by the footballers and ex-footballers themselves that it’s about time Zifa was run by them as the product, who know the rules, the ins and outs and the politics of the game.
Fundamental issues remain with how sport is generally run in Zimbabwe as incompetent sports administrators stand accused of robbing the country of its future stars. There’s no doubt that Zimbabwe is bereft of committed sports administrators, who have the players’ interests at heart.
Yes, we need new people at Zifa, but that doesn’t mean us just merely filling those positions. We want people who will stop embarrassing the country through administrative bungling that has largely been responsible for the increasingly poor performances being displayed by our various national sports teams.
Most former Warriors’ players have been vocal about the need to have former players in key Zifa positions, but it all ended as too much fast talk and no action. In the end, only James Takavada and Edzai Kasinauyo were brave enough to pick up, fill in and file their nomination papers to contest the December 5 board elections.
Takavada is standing for the coveted post of president and Kasinauyo is vying for one of the four board members’ places up for grabs.
Where are the other former footballers? What happened to their sermons of Zifa being run by people who talk, live, sleep and eat football? If at all, our ex-soccer stars have none but themselves to blame for their non-participation in the running of the country’s most popular sport.
They have failed to translate the success and popularity they commanded on the playing field into a launch pad for an equally successful football administration. Instead, they turn to coaching, which is still good, but most of the clubs they coach are led by non-football people as chairmen and other strategic roles, and they hardly make noise about this too.
Why don’t the ex-players first concentrate on ensuring clubs are run by former players before they clamour for Zifa roles? In other words, they need to start working from the bottom upwards and not the other way round hoping for some kind of luck to strike.
If the players really want football people to run the game in this country, they must start from the grassroots and work their way up. It’s fair and fine that Takavada and Kasinauyo successfully filed their nomination papers, but that doesn’t equate to winning.
If our ex-players truly have the sort of visions for local football that they pontificate about most of the times, they would have realised by now that their dreams can only be fulfilled when they occupy all the lower echelons of the game as these are responsible for deploying administrators into national leadership positions.
For example, while our ex-footballers have been talking, none of them is part of the 58 councillors that will vote in the new Zifa board on December 5. Imagine what a difference it would make had more than half of these councillors been ex-footballers? They would obviously vote in one of their own.
The sacked Zifa board had an ex-Warriors’ stalwart in the form of John Phiri, but there was nothing he could do on his own. In fact, the former Dream Team star was so compromised as his election had basically been engineered by non-football people in the first place.
Our ex-stars must know that the 58-member Zifa Assembly consisting of the councillors is the most powerful organ in the association as they have the power to elect and revoke the mandate of the Zifa board.
The problem is these people that should be taking action against incompetent officials are also incompetent officials themselves at a higher level.
I therefore advise former players to organise a summit and brainstorm on how they can use their numbers to influence the administration of football in this country.
They need to ask themselves why none of them are among the 58 that will elect the new Zifa officials and then take it from there, instead of hoping to make it into the board through promising to use “contacts in Europe”.
The 58 councillors are selected by the regions and provinces, while the rest are made of all the PSL’s 16 club chairs. Now, this is where our ex-players must start. If they could populate the administrative structures of the grassroots, they will not have to use promises of activating their contacts since their colleagues will know what one is capable or incapable of.
In other words, the ex-players must play a leading role in the running of every tier of the game and not just target the Zifa board. They must make grassroots-level soccer a nursery of our football success so that when they contest for Zifa posts, they are backed by solid accomplishments and not just promises and exploits displayed as a player.