Phillip Chiyangwa
Dingilizwe Ntuli
IT’S all systems go for the Zimbabwe Football Association (Zifa)’s much anticipated extraordinary congress being held in Harare today to elect new leaders, including the president.
Although all board positions are being contested, all eyes will be on the association’s presidential poll in which businessmen Trevor Carelse-Juul and Philip Chiyangwa, former Premier Soccer League secretary-general Leslie Gwindi and retired footballer James Takavada are slogging it out to become chief of domestic football.
All the four men have been talking a good game since their nomination papers were accepted by the association’s electoral committee last month.
However, their manifestos do not adequately address anti-corruption, which is a worrying oversight on their part considering that an avalanche of corruption is exactly what led to the sordid saga that led to the revocation of the previous board in the first place.
The quartet have all promised to repair the “severely undermined” Zifa brand but none of them actually spelled out how they intend to achieve this in the three years in office.
All they have simply done is to release a list of enticing but vague pledges with a litany of bold unexplained commitments on everything.
I am quite certain that very few councillors read the candidates’ manifestos from cover to cover or even glanced at them, although they are supposed to function more like informal contracts.
However, as the campaign for board positions swung into fully fledged action, one got the sense that the candidates were attempting to sell their personal integrity more than what they can really offer the soccer loving public of Zimbabwe.
They all clamoured for integrity since it’s a personal quality of fairness that we all aspire to be and doing the right thing in a reliable way.
But having considered all the candidates’ “promises and lies” ahead of today’s polls, I am convinced that the election is not really about the candidates, whom I would like to believe have good intentions, but all about the character of the 58 councillors that will decide who will lead Zimbabwean football.
The spotlight should equally have been on these men and women, who will literally decide which direction our game takes for the next three years.
Are these 58 souls really the right people to give us a good Zifa leadership? If we analyse the affiliates they lead or represent, would we really entrust them with our national game?
These are perhaps questions that should have been posed before today, as I am of the belief that these councillors are largely to blame for the state of football in our country.
With all due respect, I wouldn’t trust a leadership elected by a beach soccer, paralympic or tertiary representative, among others, because they have terribly failed in their respective affiliates, according to me.
I stand to be corrected, but football fans only get to hear about the existence of such affiliates during Zifa elections or when the association plunges into turmoil.
We have focused too much on the cream and ignored the crust due to its hardness. Integrity should begin at the zones all the way up to the Zifa president, and not the present top down approach people seem to prefer.
You cannot draw fresh water from a salty spring and that is the reason why our game has encountered similar problems all the time despite who the Zifa president is, because the roots are dry yet we continue expecting the tree to produce fruit.
The entire football fraternity needs to come together to affirm a new commitment to live out Zifa’s promise through courage and character.
We can either move into the future with the right people at all levels of football from the grassroots to the board level or remain stuck in the past where we blame the board and absolve those that elect them.
We have to face some hard truths and take strong steps to achieve our objectives and restore Zifa’s confidence shaken by unscrupulous officials previously elected by equally unscrupulous councillors.
All I am saying is that we need to scrutinise the characters and capabilities of our councillors first before we drop the gullotine on the top leadership because we are essentially presented with this leadership by the very dry roots that play to the gallery when push comes to shove.