Two weeks can be a very long time in the topsy-turvy world of football. Nations can rise and fall. Rough diamonds can turn into sparkling gems in the theatre of dreams. Heroes can morph into zeroes in the blink of an eye.

Dreams become true, turning dreamers into legends on the football pitch. For others, the dreams remain deferred, drying up like a raisin in the sun or festering like a sore, and then running, like the line in the Langston Hughes’ poem.

This and more is what’s been happening on the African soccer scene in the two weeks I have been in writer’s purgatory looking for my muse.

For instance, five days was all it took for Egypt to rise in victory and fall in defeat. In the sweltering heat of Cairo, the Pharoahs beat arch-rivals Algeria 2-0 to force a play-off in neutral Sudan only to tumble in the desert dust. It was a costly defeat, considering that each player would have earned US$300,000 if they’d qualified for the 2010 World Cup.


In Nigeria, a similar drama was unfolding, but some see the U-17’s 1-0 loss to Switzerland as a sign that the gods of soccer frown on age cheating.

One of the loudest critics of the team as a local lawyer, businessman and winger in the 1980 Green Eagles side that won the Africa Cup, Adokiye Amiesimaka. He claims the captain of the U-17 side, Fortune Chukhudi was at least 18 year old when he played for his team, Port Harcourt Stars seven years ago.

But the Nigerian Football Association insists that the entire U-17 team passed Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) tests to prove they were the right age.

While the controversy about questionable birth records was raging in Nigeria, in Congo DR, TP Mazembe, a local club side, was celebrating a historic CAF Champions League title win 40 years after it last won it.

For team captain, Tresor Mputu Mabi, the win had added significance. He’d pledged to stay with TP Mazembe until it won the Champions League before he considered joining a European club. And he kept his word, in spite of efforts by some European teams to lure him away.

How many local Zambian players would have made that kind of commitment and stuck to it? But then again, how many players in the KCM/FAZ Premier League earn US$10,000 a month, which is how much club owner, Moses Katumbi pays him?


Next month, the 24-year-old midfielder will lead his team to the FIFA World Club Championship in Abu Dhabi and hopefully earn himself another feather in his cap as they play against some of the best players on the planet.

Mabi was one of eleven TP Mazembe players in the Congo DR squad that won the CHAN Africa Cup in Cote d’Ivoire in March this year, beating Ghana 2-0 in the finals.
Question is: what is Congo DR doing right that Zambia isn’t? Simataa Simataa, a former Football Association of Zambia (FAZ) chairman and a Division Two club owner and he answered my question in two words. Change Management.

“Congo has managed the changes in the circumstances of their football - Zambia hasn’t. Here, the process of changing from life with ZCCM to life without ZCCM was not managed. Everybody assumed that life would be the same. Congo, on the other hand, restructured its football league to suit its pockets. They realised they could not afford a national league and decided to zone it so that winners from each zone play compete for the national championship.

From that structure, they’re able to produce African champions. In Zambia, when you talk about zoning, you’re sure to make enemies because you’re talking about money in people’s pockets. Why? Because you have dependent soccer administrators who want to eat from the game,” he said.

Simataa was talking about the culture of freeloading pervading soccer administration in Zambia It was an issue I discussed in my column of October 30, but Power Dynamos club secretary, Justin Kapoma took particular exception to a “ misrepresentation of fact” I had made probably with the intention of “destabilising” the club.

I’d written: “ It does not make sense for officials of a team like Power Dynamos for instance to come to Lusaka on a Thursday for a match with ZANACO on Saturday, and check themselves into the five-star Taj Pamodzi or Chrismar while the players shack up in the dinginess of Chainama Hotel…”

Kapoma said club executives never stayed in five-star hotels when they came into town on club business.

“Some of our club officials hold very senior positions in their companies which are at liberty to choose the class of hotel accommodation they want for their executives. Therefore, it must not be construed that each time a Power Dynamos official is in Lusaka then they are running Power Dynamos errands,” he explained.


But Simataa says Kapoma doesn’t have enough institutional memory to mount a legitimate defence.

“When Ben Bamfuchile was Power coach, I visited him at Lusaka Hotel where the team was staying. I asked where the club officials were and he said: Chrismar Hotel. Three officials had arrived on Friday for the game on Saturday and stayed till Monday at the club’s expense.

Disgusted, I called the general manager at Power Division and complained about what was going on because it wasn’t the first time. Nkana Red Devils were no different. They had a standing account at Pamodzi Hotel. Officials would arrive ahead of the team, check themselves into the hotel and live large at Nkana’s expense,” he disclosed, insisting he can name names.

If these were isolated incidents, four ZESCO United club officials plus two executives from the power company wouldn’t have flown with the team to Cote d’Ivoire to play against African Sports in the third round of the Champions League earlier this year.

Assuming a return economy ticket from Lusaka to Abidjan costs $2,000, you’d be spending US$12,000 on six tickets. That is, if they choose not to fly Business Class.

Throw in five-star hotel accommodation, meals, allowances and all the other trappings and we’d be talking about the GDP of a poor African country!

But freeloading is just the tip of a very huge iceberg. According to Simataa, the lack of meaningful records at Football House is much more serious problem.

“You can’t trace the history of Zambian football using FAZ records because they don’t exist. Records about who played, who scored, statistics, tenure of office, who was the coach when, financial records and so on. When I was in FAZ, I asked an official at the Secretariat for some records going back three years. He told me the records had been burnt.

How can there be a handover from one executive to another if there are no records? This lack of institutional memory at FAZ means that those who come into office have nowhere to start from. Unless they rely on their own personal memory,” he said.

In my search for more answers, I turned to an old journalist friend whose memories go back far. Jay Mwamba now lives and works in New York but comes home every year on holiday.

He worked for the Zambia Daily Mail as a sports reporter from 1982 to 1988 when the national team was still called The KK Eleven. He travelled extensively with the team and developed personal relationships with players like Alex Chola, Peter Kaumba, Efford Chabala, Johnston Bwalya, Charles Musonda and Kalusha Bwalya.

I asked him what the single biggest obstacle to the development of Zambian soccer is and this is what he said.

“Actually, it’s a combination of factors. Administration is poor. Infrastructure is lacking and there is no talent development of talent or youth programmes to speak of. What government should have done when selling the mines was demand that the buyers spend a certain amount of money to maintain community programmes that supported the mine teams in return for tax rebates.

The fact that it didn’t was a major blow to Zambian football. The national team is just the barometer for the overall state of the game. The people running football should look back at Zambia ’s successful years and try to replicate the factors and conditions that existed then.”

Mwamba says Zambian soccer players fail to break into Europe because they lack quality. “There’s some promising talent right now, but our guys still fall short of the other Africans who are making it in Europe.

The main problem here is lack of proper coaching at the youth level. Kids play football everywhere in the world, but they have to be coached early and taught the basics of the game.

Football is not just about dribbling and running fast. There are technical nuances and tactics that players should know. When you go for trials in Europe, coaches look at how you do certain things, how you fit into a team, and not just how you dribble.”

He said local clubs need to invest in soccer academies if Zambia is to make any headway in football on the world stage.

“In the old days, all the First and Second Division teams had reserve sides. Some had youth teams. There were also teams sponsored in different leagues by big companies and even the defence forces. Obviously, with the economy being as bad as it is now, clubs can’t support two or more teams and large pools of players.

But academies are the way to go. That’s the trend now in the so-called Third World. The Asec Mimosa academy in Cote d’Ivoire has produced a cream of Ivorian internationals such Kolo and Yaya Toure, Emmanuel Eboue, Salomon Kalou and a host of others.


Michael Essien, Sulley Muntari and other members of the Black Stars are also products of soccer academies in Ghana. In Zambia, Chiparamba is probably the best academy we’ve had and look at the players they’ve produced and placed overseas.

With a few exceptions, Zambian players have not shown the drive, hunger and discipline needed to succeed at the highest level of professional football. Which is why players with immense talent keep falling by the wayside,” Mwamba said.

Postscript: Next Friday, I will bring the four-part series on Zambian football I started on October 30 to a close, even though the debate is by no means over. To all those who have been writing in to say their bit, thanks for the contributions, but the time had come to close this chapter and move on to something else before I bore readers to death. Enjoy your weekend.