The Sunday News
IT is surprising that the Minister of Sports, Arts and Culture, Cde Andrew Langa, seems to continue absolving the Zifa board led by the beleaguered Cuthbert Dube of any blame on the shameful banning of our beloved Warriors from the 2018 World Cup qualifiers by Fifa on Thursday last week.
What surprises us is that it seems Cde Langa is not in touch with what is going on within his portfolio as evidenced by his response when our sister paper, Chronicle sought his views on Thursday about the ban over the $60 000 debt owed to the former national team coach, Brazilian Jose Valinhos.
By 7pm on that fateful day the minister was still not aware of the incident that had caught world attention. But his colleagues in Government, the Minister of Information, Media and Broadcasting Services, Professor Jonathan Moyo, and his deputy Cde Tabeth Kanengoni-Malinga were already active about the issue proffering solutions on the emotive issue while the minister in charge was at sea.
Also in yesterday’s issue of Chronicle, Cde Langa surprised us all by seemingly absolving the Zifa board of any wrongdoing, insisting that the Zifa Assembly was to blame for this fiasco not the Dube-led executive. “While all criticism has mainly been targeted at the Zifa board, my ministry notes that control of the board vests in the Zifa Assembly,” he said in a statement on Friday.
“The latter, therefore, are equally if not more culpable for the goings-on in Zifa. The Zifa Assembly are the ones who voted the Zifa board into office and it is them who can exercise the prerogative to withdraw their mandate, or to take any other concrete action that demonstrates their resolve to ensure that there is professionalism in the administration of our football.”
We are not satisfied with the minister’s views.
What we want from the minister is for him to stop dithering over the issue and come out clean and point his supposed authoritative finger at the forehead of Cuthbert Dube as we, like many other Zimbabweans, believe he is the one responsible for the mess we find ourselves in as a country.
We believe Cde Langa should not be afraid of rolling his sleeves and getting dirty. This is the time to deal with the Zifa blundering once and for all. Whatever the pain, the risks, decisions have to be made. We want to remind Cde Langa that people in leadership positions like him who avoid what they believe are unpleasant decisions render themselves incapable of doing their job.
The effect of the ban on the Zimbabwean people who take football as a religion is too much to contemplate. Football, not only in Zimbabwe, is the most popular game in terms of the number of participants and spectators. At the turn of the 21st century, it is said Fifa estimated that there were about 250 million football players and more than 1,3 billion people “interested” in football.
In 2010 it is believed that a combined 26 billion television audience watched soccer’s premier tournament, the quadrennial World Cup finals in neighbouring South Africa. So if you mess around with football, you will be messing around with people’s lives. Corrective measures should be taken and in arriving at that crucial decision the Minister of Sport should lead from the front instead of ducking and diving.
