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Cuthbert Dube

Ricky Zililo Senior Sports Reporter
ZIFA has admitted to plunging the country’s football into a mess and has promised to remedy the situation.
Fifa expelled Zimbabwe from the 2018 Fifa World Cup over a $60,000 debt owed to former national team coach José Claudinei Georgini, popularly known as Valinhos, last week.

The expulsion, Fifa said, follows a decision passed on August 15, 2012 by the Fifa Players’ Status Committee.

Speaking for the first time after Zimbabwe’s shock exit from the world’s most coveted football showpiece qualifiers during a Zimbabwe National Army Charities Shield banquet on Sunday evening, Zifa vice-president Omega Sibanda owned up to the crisis and said they would rectify problems bedevilling the football motherbody.

“Obviously, I can’t speak about what you are reading because you already know. It’s written in the papers (expulsion of Zimbabwe by Fifa) and that’s what is happening. You will learn more from the newspapers, it’s not my mandate to say what is happening but it’s a sorry situation. It’s going to be fine, I promise it’s going to be fine,” Sibanda said.

Pressed to qualify his statement and state strategies his association was taking to extricate Zimbabwean football out of its dark hole, Sibanda said he was waiting to hear the outcome of an emergency meeting held in Harare on Friday.

Following the emergency committee meeting details of the plan of action to save the ailing association from further embarrassment were unavailable.

Zifa president Cuthbert Dube and some of his colleagues held the emergency meeting to find a solution to the mess that they’ve dragged the country’s football into.

Ironically, the Zifa emergency committee made up of its president Dube, Twine Phiri, John Phiri and Fungai Chihuri, was part of the association’s leadership when it received its last Valinhos warning from Fifa in 2013.

Chihuri and Dube were part of Zifa when Valinhos was hired and fired in 2008.

What irked Fifa to act harshly on Zifa was that the latter did not settle its debt and disciplinary proceedings for failure to respect a decision (in application of Article 64 of the Fifa Disciplinary Code) were opened against Zifa at the request of the coach.

It emerged also that the beleaguered Cuthbert Dube-led association ignored many Fifa warnings and grace periods, the last being in April 2013 when the world football body gave Zifa a 60-day period to settle half of the debt to Valinhos and a 120-day period for the remainder.

This publication has it on good authority that most Zifa board members who were voted into office last year were in the dark about Fifa’s communication to the country’s football motherbody with regards to the Valinhos case. They got to know about it last week when the country was banned from participating in the 2018 World Cup qualifiers.

After a string of gaffes that have seen Zifa’s debts ballooning leading to some of its properties being auctioned, there have been calls to dissolve the Zifa board.

So sensitive is the Fifa expulsion matter at Zifa that its communications manager Xolisani Gwesela could not respond to questions referring this writer to the association’s chief executive officer Jonathan Mashingaidze.

Repeated efforts to get a comment from Mashingaidze, who sits in the emergency committee “in an ex-officio role”, were fruitless as he was said to be holed up in meetings.