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Dingilizwe Ntuli, Sports  Editor
HOW did Zifa go from being bad to really bad within 12 months with a new administration? Zifa president Philip Chiyangwa and his board were thrust into office on December 5, 2015, on a platform of fresh hope that good administration and the game’s development would finally grow, but it instead has been 12 months littered with chaos, confusion, bickering and senseless suspensions.

The time after Cuthbert Dube’s departure has really been marked by crucial missteps, ego clashes and generally poor administration that have seen football administrators competing to dominate the sports pages for their boardroom blunders or extraordinary arrogance, leaving players of the game very little space.

From the “weekend special” sacking and re-engagement of Warriors’ coach Callisto Pasuwa at the beginning of this year to wanton suspensions without hearings of officials, the ill-conceived attempted dissolution of Zifa and stillbirth of Nafaz, and the ongoing promotion and relegation fiasco involving the PSL, Zifa, as domestic football’s governing body, has shown no vision nor solid plans for the national game to progress and succeed.

The most annoying aspect is that the December 2015 elections had presented an opportunity, which has clearly been missed, for Zifa to clean up its image, but the elected officials failed to build on their campaign promises. Sadly, failure to conform to tenets of good governance continues to be the cornerstone of the national association.

This has created room for confusion and corruption, and one needs not look further than the running of the four regional Zifa leagues. Some teams accumulated substantial points in the boardroom than on the field of play. One of the teams actually clinched the league title in its region through this method, defeating the whole purpose of fair play.

As a result, Zifa does not enjoy public goodwill because it has not concerned itself with being answerable and accountable to its major stakeholders, the fans.

Zifa’s self-serving and short-sighted actions were on display through its constitutional committee chairman Itai Ndudzo in yesterday’s edition of Chronicle Sport dismissing the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) mediation in the promotion and relegation impasse with the PSL.

Ndudzo boasted that Zifa does not recognise the application filed by the PSL with CAS, insisting that the league needed to first exhaust domestic remedies over the promotion and relegation dispute. Ndudzo said Zifa would “not be intimidated by communication from CAS” as it was treating the PSL and the 16 clubs as different entities. He argues that the clubs and PSL are members of Zifa.

Such utterances only serve to sink Zifa into disrepute and to allow the local game to be viewed with a mixture of sadness and contempt. That the 16 PSL clubs, since Ndudzo says they don’t recognise the PSL, took the dispute to CAS in Switzerland, is proof enough that they have no faith in the Zifa systems. Ndudzo says there is already a process led by Piraishe Mabhena and comprising PSL club representatives attending to the issue, but what he did not reveal is that it deadlocked. Even the arbitral tribunal he alludes to is bound to fail because Zifa seems to be approaching the matter with an agenda to capture the PSL.

After all, Zifa councillors, excluding PSL clubs, plunged the game into chaos by seeking to force the PSL to relegate two and promote four teams, expanding the topflight league to an unsustainable 18 teams. The timing of the resolution was questionable, as it was made with two games to the end of the season.

No one knows what’s going on and teams that won the regional Zifa leagues also don’t know where they will be playing next season. Even Castle Lager PSL sponsors Delta Beverages expressed frustration at the Zifa orchestrated commotion and were non-committal about renewing their association with topflight football in the 2017 season. It seems Zifa is unmoved by the sponsor’s disquiet, a move likely to scare other potential sponsors, risking condemning the top-tier league to a “sponsorless” season. Only Zifa can drag such an important issue into the off-season and with the festive season approaching and the Warriors taking part in the African Cup of Nations in early January, the impasse might continue into the 11th hour, making planning for the 2017 season a herculean task.

Zifa should spare us its CAS bravado and urgently address the continuous pathetic administrative issues bedeviling the national association that sunk us into this mess in the first place. Ndudzo should instead be apologising to the soccer loving public for this disgraceful episode instead of further embarrassing the local game with his “war” talk. Zifa shouldn’t continue to harbour people that are singularly preoccupied with holding onto positions instead of restructuring themselves to provide a more effective administration.

It’s time for Chiyangwa to stand up and make his mark by going the extra mile to restore sanity, credibility and efficiency at Zifa by reining in the chaos fomented by his four regions that want to usurp control of the national game. Some of these officials are just using Zifa as a weapon to make money.