The Sunday News
Ngqwele Dube, Sports Correspondent
YOUTH, Sport, Arts and Recreation Minister, Kirsty Coventry has called for a change in approach to stadium management through roping in corporates into private public partnerships.
Sporting facilities in the country are mainly owned by local authorities and Government, who have over the years struggled to make improvements to the infrastructure to meet rising international demands leading to the recent ban on all local football stadia by Africa’s football governing body Caf, together with Fifa.
Speaking on Twitter, Coventry said while her ministry was busy making improvements to the National Sports Stadium and Barbourfields to ensure they meet Caf and Fifa standards they were conversant of the need to rope in private companies in running stadiums.
She said the country has to adopt the international practice whereby corporates are involved in maintaining sporting infrastructure to avoid the decay of the facilities.
“We are working on the transfer of the management of the facilities, National Sports, Barbourfields and Chitungwiza Aquatic Centre and Hockey stadiums and once done we want to structure it in a way that is done around the world where corporates come in and we have proper private public partnerships to ensure that we never get ourselves into that situation again,” said Coventry.
“We are frantically working on improvements at the National Sports Stadium and Barbourfields and I am glad that we have now been approved to host women and youth football matches but we are still in the process of ensuring we attend to the concerns raised by the Fifa inspectors with focus on anti-doping areas, lighting and buckets seats and depending where we are on Covid-19 and all over the world, the inspectors will be coming back in June or July.”
Coventry recently announced Government had agreed to the transfer of management of sporting facilities from the Ministry of Local Government to the Sports portfolio.
Competing budgetary priorities have seen local authorities and Government reduce funding towards stadium maintenance resulting in the country’s facilities lagging behind in improvements that are being demanded by international sporting bodies.
The issue of stadium improvement came to a head early this year when Caf condemned Barbourfields Stadium and the National Sports Stadium as being unfit to host their official competitions with Zimbabwe having been directed to host a pending Afcon qualifier match against Algeria outside the country.
