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Zifa president Philip Chiyangwa

OUR football once again entered a new chapter of chaos at the weekend as the bad blood between governing body Zifa and the Premier Soccer League erupted out in the open at the national association’s council meeting in Harare in a row over promotional play-offs.

Some Zifa councillors smuggled the issue of promotional play-offs onto the agenda and subsequently voted in favour of relegating four teams from the PSL at the end of the season, deliberately ignoring a standing 2015 resolution to chop two.

The Zifa Assembly resolved to relegate two teams from the PSL at the end of the 2016 season in a 2015 meeting, with promotional play-offs involving winners of Zifa’s four regional leagues being held to determine the two teams to be promoted into the topflight.

Do Zifa councillors know that the administrative chaos caused by their irresponsible and outright stupid weekend vote also raises key questions about the structures of the subsequent lower divisions?

How does one wake up and change the rules with two games left to the end of the season? It seems the desire by the four Zifa regions, Northern, Southern, Eastern and Central, to control the purse of the promotional play-offs was at the centre of the chaos, after the PSL committed to staging the play-offs at its cost.

With the PSL staging and funding the play-offs, the Zifa regions were not going to get their hands on the money they had envisaged in their pockets. They had planned to share 80 percent of the broadcast rights, with the PSL and Zifa sharing the remaining 20 percent.

The shocking thing though is that these Zifa regions were negotiating for broadcast rights with Kwese TV, which has no broadcasting licence and is not readily available in the country, while the PSL has SuperSport.

Surely there is something endemically wrong in the Zifa culture and a paradigm shift needs to take place for our football to move forward.

The love of money by Zifa councillors has stalled the development and growth of football in Zimbabwe. Honestly how can one love money to the extent of negotiating broadcast rights with a virtually non-accessible station. This proves the emptiness of most Zifa councillors and one wonders how they got to those positions in the first place.

They seem to be in our football structures for self-gratification and not for the love of the game, as has been demonstrated by their chaotic manoeuvres. Their failures are reflected in the abysmal failure to grant the Mighty Warriors decent preparations for the Women’s Afcon.

The Women’s Afcon kicks-off in Cameroon in two weeks’ time and if we ask the councillors at the forefront of the chaos what they have done to ensure the Mighty Warriors go into camp and adequately prepare for the event, they wouldn’t tell you.

We should have better people at Zifa. Soccer loving Zimbabweans have now been worn down by this continued organisational chaos due to useless and unprofessional people who are there simply to extort as much money as they can while in office.

Zifa has been in crisis mode as a result of systematic vote-buying during elections and it now seems no issue can be resolved without money. We suspect councillors are used to a culture of being paid to pass certain resolutions and use their vote to revolt when this option doesn’t exist anymore.

We cannot carry on with a system full of bad habits and corruption. We therefore call for reasonable minimum requirements to be set for one to become a Zifa councillor and not the present free for all where known failures are thrust into strategic positions they use only to advance their selfish cause at the expense of the game.