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Dingilizwe Ntuli
THE past six months have seen continuous denigration of the nation’s favourite sport — football. During this period, Zifa has serially sought to kill the love for the game and have disturbingly registered a lot of success along this destructive path by their blatant disregard of the basic tenets of corporate governance.

Zifa’s absolute incompetence has destroyed football and the morale of both the players and fans is equally plummeting.

Barring appropriate intervention by the sports regulatory body, the Sports and Recreation Commission (SRC), to put Zifa back on track, the local game will continue to wake up to one horrendous football headline after another.

The senior national soccer team, the Warriors, was ejected from the 2018 Fifa World Cup qualifiers due to the self-inflicted folly of failing to pay former coach Valinhos despite warnings of such consequences by the world football governing body.

Their female counterparts, the Mighty Warriors, couldn’t travel to Ivory Coast for a 2016 Rio Olympic Games qualifier after Zifa failed to raise $34,000 for the squad’s airfares.

Zifa were lucky to be slapped with a $10,000 fine as another ban could have been imposed.

And for the umpteenth time, Warriors’ and Young Warriors’ coach Callisto Pasuwa walked out on the national Under-23 side as they prepared for tonight’s Caf Championship qualifier against neighbouring South Africa in Pietermaritzburg over unpaid dues.

Pasuwa felt disrespected by Zifa saying there have been too many promises and lies by the domestic football governing body.

Pasuwa also walked out just before the Warriors’ 2017 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers against Malawi in June and only returned after the SRC paid him.

Zifa was also fined $25,000 by Caf after the association’s secretariat failed to properly fill in forms for the country’s CHAN participation.

Zifa’s catalogue of disasters is probably only matched by the indifference at the SRC.

The SRC on Thursday directed the Zimbabwe Handball Federation to hold elections to elect a substantive committee by not later than August 31.

According to a statement, SRC director of sport development Joseph Muchechetere’s eyes were opened to the fact that the state of handball had “reached a low ebb” epitomised by factional groupings.

Muchechetere stated that this was untenable and not in line with good tenets of corporate governance for sport and charged that the SRC could not sit back and watch the situation degenerate into a circus.

Really! The SRC have chosen to put their foot down, or is it to bully the little known handball association, but remain blind to the circus at Zifa.

Why have the SRC not been this decisive when dealing with Zifa? The problems bedevilling Zifa are well documented but the SRC chose the cowardly route of a useless committee of inquiry, whose findings would be no different from what the media have been reporting on if serious work was really done, seeing that the public hearings into the state of football flopped.

I would like to draw Muchechetere to a statement released by Zifa soon after the Mighty Warriors failed to travel to Ivory Coast last month. Part of the statement reads: “When we affiliated to the competition, we submitted our budget to the Sports and Recreation Commission but due to the harsh economic environment, even the government cannot afford to entirely bankroll football national teams’ assignments. Without government and corporate support, football in this country will remain in the doldrums….. We would like to reiterate that worldwide national teams are funded by their respective governments.”

If Zifa submit their budget to you and if national teams worldwide are funded by their respective governments as stated, then what is difficult about the SRC establishing good corporate governance at the football mother body by putting to end the prevailing circus?

Zifa has openly acknowledged that they cannot survive without government funding, which is channelled to national sports associations through the SRC, but the regulatory body has developed permanent cold feet when it comes to dealing with the football body.

As some people have previously pointed out, this Fifa policy of non-interference by governments into the affairs of football associations has only made them more corrupt.

Fifa allows governments to sponsor national associations using public funds, but say the same governments cannot have a say in the affairs of football.

That’s the height of hypocrisy.

Fifa can do us a favour by taking Zifa president Cuthbert Dube and his disciples and do whatever they want with them because we are sick and tired of their incompetence.

It’s astonishing to me that the SRC can threaten a small association whose supposed misdemeanours are a picnic compared to the very public stench coming from Zifa House.

For how long shall we continue to tolerate the rot at Zifa? Dube believes he is our country’s football messiah, openly boasting that there would be no Zifa without him? What trash-talk from the only man to deliberately cause the banning of the country from World Cup participation.

Zifa received more than $1 million from Fifa this year, but Dube chose to get the Warriors banned by not paying off Valinhos’ debt so that he could save his personal property from being auctioned by a local hotel over a Zifa debt.

Why in the first place was he using his personal property as surety for Zifa? Was it to get the Warriors banned from the World Cup by choosing to save his property over paying Valinhos? Was it to prematurely end the Mighty Warriors’ Olympic qualifiers?

Now that Dube has successfully saved his personal property, can he resign now and looked after his beloved property to save Zifa?

More bans are in the pipeline as Pasuwa and other previous Warriors’ coaches remain unpaid. All it will take is for them to lodge a complaint with Fifa, just like with Valinhos and the country will again be kicked out of international tournaments.

Football is about bringing happiness to families, but Dube and his cabal that includes Zifa chief executive officer Jonathan Mashingaidze have destroyed our football and brought shame to the country.

Zifa needs people who will put the growth of football ahead of their personal gains, and Dube and Mashingaidze are not those people.

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