By Luke Tamborinyoka
We have just been plunged into unmitigated national shame that grievously harms and undermines our national sovereignty.
As the regime basks in the aftermath of what it claims to be its successful hosting of the 44th SADC summit, our men’s national football soccer team, the Warriors, will be hosting their matches in Uganda after the global and continental football authorities condemned all our national stadia.
Dear reader, just how does a truly sovereign country host its international football matches outside its own territory?
Have things collapsed in Zimbabwe under Mr Emmerson Mnangagwa to such a parlous and pitiable level that a whole sovereign country that now chairs a regional body cannot host a football match l?
As Mr\Mnangagwa was still revelling in his presumed success in hosting the just-ended SADC summit, the Zimbabwe Football Association (ZIFA) on Wednesday revealed that the Warriors will play their upcoming AFCON Qualifiers home match against Cameroon in Uganda at Mandela National Stadium.
The Warriors, the national team of our sovereign nation, has previously hosted its “home” matches in Rwanda and South Africa.
The Warriors are scheduled to face Kenya next month on the 6th of September at the same venue before playing Cameroon on the 10th.
Just like Zimbabwe, Kenya does not have an approved CAF standard stadium hence they have also migrated to Uganda.
Zimbabwe has been without a CAF-approved stadium since last year September and has been using Rwanda and South Africa as venues for all their “home” international football games.
The newly installed SADC chair, must for once be embarrassed that his own national team will be hosting its matches in East Africa, well outside his own country and outside the region he claims to chair.
Is it not embarrassing that the country presided over by the chair of a whole regional body cannot host a simple football match?
Instead of the Presidential goat scheme, the Presidential borehole scheme, the Presidential wheat scheme or some such dubious Presidential schemes, most of which have been vehicles of grand looting, why not a Presidential sports infrastructure scheme to rehabilitate our national stadia and other dilapidated sports infrastructure?
It has not helped that we have the worst Sports \Minister in history who only appears in the news when she is leading a bloated team of over 60 officials to accompany seven athletes to the Olympic games.
ED is the same man who spent millions of taxpayers’ money to pay Italian contractors to build Swiss villas to accommodate SADC Heads f State during the summit in Zimbabwe.
The villas were not completed in time; the millions went down the drain yet the same government is failing to renovate our national stadia and spare us this embarrassment of our national football team “hosting” their matches in other countries..
The regime in Zimbabwe has always frequently and sonorously shouted about our status as a sovereign State.
But for a country that “hosts” its home football matches on foreign lands; that uses a multiple (foreign) currency system, mainly the US dollar; a country whose “sovereign” Parliament is a donation from China and whose President is widely rumoured to be from the Mumbwa area of Zambia, all our rhetoric about sovereignty begins to fall flat on the tenuous reality of the foreign-ness of our lived circumstances.
Now we cannot even host an international football match in our own country. And yet the country’s President has the temerity to pontificate about sovereignty every other day.
For me, the lasting impression that we are not a sovereign nation was the image from last year’s opening of the new Parliament building in Mt Hampden that was “donated” by China.
There stood a grinning Mr Emerson Mnangagwa, a Zambian who presumes to be our President, drunk with Russian vodka, dressed in an Italian suit and obviously with US greenbacks in his pocket while officially opening a Chinese-donated Parliament!
What a tragic irony?
Now the Warriors, the football national team of our sovereign nation, are having to host their homes games in Uganda, a far-flung country in East Africa.
It must be shameful to the new SADC chairperson, if he has any shame at all, that the national team from his own country is now hosing its matches in Uganda in East Africa, well outside the region that he now claims to be presiding over as regional chair.
In what must constitute a serious undermining of our sovereignty, China has donated a whole Parliament building to us and is now flying its flag there while Uganda, Rwanda and South Africa have shamefully become the home nations of our national football team.
A nation’s Parliament is the cradle of a country’s sovereignty, where people’s elected representatives deliberate on the key matters affecting the sovereign citizens.
A Parliament is a sacred building that encapsulates national sovereignty and you cannot have that donated by another nation.
Just how does a typical African man claim sole and sovereign authority at his home when both his bedroom and the mating reed-mat were gifts from the man next-door? Or, more appropriately, how does a man boast of his presumed patrimonial sovereignty when his wife’s underclothes were bought by the dip attendant ( mudhhibhisi ) from a village faraway?
This is exactly what the Chinese have done to Zimbabwe by ‘donating” what ought to be a poignant symbol of national sovereignty.
This is exactly what Rwanda, South Africa and Uganda have done by donating their national soils to be our own national football grounds.
Sovereignty? My foot!
*Luke Tamborinyoka is a citizen from Domboshava. He is a journalist and a political scientist by profession.
