Two days to go to Chiyangwa Waterloo…

IT was predictable. The onslaught in the last days have been especially painful for Camp Chiyangwa. Events, both natural and otherwise have not been forgiving. One drop after another has become the order of the day….and …..somehow some rains had to drop to assuage the anguish Lazarus in Hades style. And indeed the rains have dropped in Harare in the last two days.

That has been the cue the Chiyangwa mouthpiece has been waiting for and he spectacularly hid behind the glasses of “Sports Reporter” in a story headlined: Zambian football toxicity has a similar ringing tone – only that there was nothing similar in the two circumstances in every requested sort or cloned.

The story was predictably about Chiyangwa, whose term of office is ending in two days and has been ending each day since December 5, 2015. Thursday will just be a culmination, not a coronation of confusion as attempted in the story that hit the streets in Harare on Tuesday morning.

I have spoken about this on several foras, including the popular Soccer Africa magazine show beamed by Supersport Thursday nights and I will repeat here again so that our friends who are refusing to understand can read again. Chiyangwa came into power at an EGM on December 5, 2015, which was necessitated by the Congress decision to recall the entire executive committee then led by Cuthbert Dube. The move meant that more 50% of the posts in the executive committee became vacant.

According to the ZIFA constitution, if such a scenario obtains, the General Secretary of ZIFA can invoke article 32.10 which says: “If more than 50 percent of the positions should become vacant, the General Secretary shall convene an Extraordinary Congress within two months in order to elect a replacement for the remaining term of mandate under the supervision of the Electoral Committee according to Zifa Electoral Code”.

This is how Chiyangwa came into office, ostensibly to finish Dube term of office that had began March 29 2014 and due to end fours years later, which in this March. Any other explanation, mooted in dark Football alleys is a lie made in Hell. It could have been mooted by people with nefarious intentions, but sadly Football still has a few upright people to call order on statutes.

The Chiyangwa mouthpiece can call anyone names, it won’t change the fact that Chiyangwa is living his last two days and the fact that the same paper talks of waiting on Fifa to chart a way forward is testimony that legitimacy to manage or rule is gone. Why the need for direction from Fifa if you have a constitutional mandate? Sadly our constitution has no provisions for extension of term of office of anyone.

Crucially Chiyangwa can not have a term beyond that of the Congress that elected him. The Congress that elected him in 2015 has their term of office which was four years from 2014, now effectively over. Who will Chiyangwa be leading for the “extra wide balls” he has bought himself through his mouthpiece?

The paper demonstrated their blindness to reality when quoting art 25, which deals exclusively with ELECTIONS and has got only six paragraphs, yet the paper added a fictitious eighth paragraph intimating, “for election of President of Zifa, which are conducted separately in terms of article 38 as directed by article 25.6 of the ZIFA constitution…”.
Article 38 talks exclusively about CANDIDATES FOR THE OFFICE OF THE PRESIDENT. Please note the elections referred to by this article 38 refer to an election that takes place an at an elective AGM, not the EGM as in the case of Chiyangwa. More importantly the election of the executive committee is done by affiliates which themselves should have been elected from Area Zones upwards, meaning they’re the ones who constitutes Congress.

How then is it possible for the executive committee to have a term longer than that of Congress that elected them. Sounds like common sense but is pure arithmetic to Chiyangwa and his cohorts. FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who took the button from Sept Blatter in similar circumstances is now at the end of the Blatter term and is subjecting himself to Congress to elect him for a fresh mandate. We have not heard him saying he still has three years of his term but is preparing for his election with the knowledge that the Blatter term is ending this year.

Only in ZIFA do we have such madness…..and in his gallery he has those blowing the horns to High Heavens, but you know what…..constitution is supreme and before it everyone is a merely mortal and subject. Come Thursday, Zifa Assembly will be vacant, every one of the 58 Council seats will be empty and every one of the six executive committee seats, whose most vocal and divisive occupant was Phillip Chiyangwa, will also be vacant.

Whether FIFA comes or not, responds or not that position will not change. The SRC have an obligation to advise both the public, government and all stakeholders that in terms of the SRC Act, ZIFA have for now no representation, nor have they approached their offices at the National Sports Stadium for the necessary registration rituals, just like every other association registered with them as required by the law.

One of my favourite schooldays author, George Orwell wrote: “A people that elect corrupt politicians…..are not victims….but accomplices. Just sharing, I guess.