The Herald
10 August 2013
The Warriors’ bonus row last Friday, and its disruptive effects on the players and their focus, reminded me of the first day I met David Coltart, the new Minister of Sport in a portfolio that included Education, Arts and Culture, at a Harare hotel in 2009, and I realised that while four years have passed since then, very little has changed for the Warriors.
Then, just like last Friday, the tournament that we were competing in was CHAN, the only difference being that we had qualified for the finals in Cote d’Ivoire, by the time I met David at that hotel in the city’s northern suburbs, while right now we still have another hurdle to clear to maintain our perfect record of qualifying for every CHAN finals.
Then, just like last Friday, the Warriors were up in arms with Zifa over bonuses and allowances and poor David, in his first official assignment as Minister of Sport, found himself trying to diffuse a row whose origins he didn’t know with the players adamant they would not board the plane to Cote d’Ivoire if their demands were not met.
They had been promised a bonus for qualifying but while they had delivered the ticket to Cote d’Ivoire, Zifa had not delivered their promise, and there was chaos at that hotel when I arrived with David trying his best to advise them that the government had no money for such expenditure and persuade them to still go to Cote d’Ivoire and fight for the flag.
Of course, they went to Cote d’Ivoire, as dispirited as they were, and in their first match they led Ghana 2-0 before the Black Stars fought back to level 2-2, in their second match they rallied from behind to force a 1-1 draw against DRC and in their final match drew 0-0 against Libya.
Those Warriors were unbeaten in their three games and that their group also produced the two teams that met in the final, Ghana and DRC, put their quality into perspective and one can only imagine what they would have achieved, in that tournament, with a bit of incentives and without carrying the burden of disruptions that had characterised their final days at home.
Sadly, the demons that crippled our CHAN finals campaign in 2009, even before we had landed in Abidjan, the perennial player rows over unpaid bonuses and allowances and unfulfilled promises as a bankrupt national game continues to be trapped in a quagmire of poverty, remain even up to this very day.
It’s easy to forget that this Zifa board hadn’t yet assumed power, in February 2009, when that bonus raw ahead of the CHAN finals erupted, which means that it’s a feature that has been a common denominator in the game really.
Zifa insist Coltart did very little, some of the hawks in that organisation claim he did absolutely nothing, to help their cause and lift them from their perpetual state of insolvency and Cuthbert Dube publicly mocked the GNU as a two-headed snake, which to him was more dangerous than the conventional one-headed snake.
I’m not sure, really, if Coltart could have done more for football, in an environment where funds were always scarce, but the point really is that given he leaves our national game in exactly the same situation that he found it — penniless and hopeless — those who are taking a hit at him will find quite some justification in doing so.
But blaming Coltart for the financial mess that our national game finds itself in, claiming that he didn’t do more as the Minister to help us, would be drifting away from reality because the challenges that confront our football, worsened by perennial under-funding going back years, were not his creation and neither could they have been resolved by him alone.
Four years ago, Coltart’s first assignment in football, as Sports Minister, was to try and diffuse a row over bonuses for the Warriors and last Friday, as results confirmed he could be on his way out of government, it’s ironic isn’t it, that the national team was still reeling from the same challenges he faced when he walked into government four years ago.
If this is goodbye David, such is life mate, it’s not your problem really because Lovemore Banda summed it up quite well back in the ‘90s, when the sports segment of ZTV main news at 8pm was a must for all who loved both sport and the poetry that accompanied its reports by the anchor, our national game is a tragicomedy — the characters, like you David, will change time and again but the story remains the same.