The long-awaited football indaba, meant to find lasting solutions to a myriad of problems bedevilling local football will kick start this morning at a local hotel with Vice-President and Zifa patron John Landa Nkomo expected to deliver the keynote address.Report by Sports Editor The indaba has been organised by the Ministry of Education, Sport, Arts and Culture in collaboration with the Sports and Recreation Commission.
Sports minister David Coltart believes this is the time to “sort out” Zimbabwe football. The meeting will be closed to the Press, save for the keynote address in the morning, while Coltart and Zifa president Cuthbert Dube will address a joint Press conference at the end of the proceedings.
Local football has been on the decline since 2006 when Wellington Nyatanga was Zifa president after various national teams were involved in a match-fixing scandal — now commonly referred to as Asiagate — whose investigations have dragged on since 2010.
The Dube administration had set out to get to the bottom of the matter since 2010 and that has led to football development being ignored. Instead 99 players and officials were suspended for their alleged involvement with a third already cleared. The rest await their fate from an independent committee chaired by Justice Ahmed Ebrahim.
Recently, the Under-20 team failed to travel to Angola for an Africa Youth Championship return leg after failing to secure tickets. Last week, the Under-17 team made a two-day road trip to Mozambique for a second leg match and, fortunately for them, managed to win 2-0 and qualify for the next round on a 4-2 aggregate. Now Zifa has to mobilise resources for the next encounter in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
Today’s indaba comes after Zifa launched a marketing committee, termed Mzansi90, to mobilise funds for the Warriors’ second leg of the Africa Cup of Nations encounter against Angola next month, the 2014 World Cup qualifiers which resume in March next year and any future international assignments.
The objectives of the indaba are:
- To identify the key issues that merit interventions to achieve sustainable football development
- To develop consensus on strategies to develop grassroots football
- To mobilise stakeholder support for investment in football development programmes and national teams efforts
- To develop a suitable fund mobilisation and management model (eg a football trust fund) to maximise resource availability for football development programmes.
