It was comical to see the minister walking gingerly on eggs with that age-old FIFA rule of ‘no government interference’ uppermost in his mind as he called for all to ensure they do the right thing to get football out of the morass that makes the Palapye Glass Project scandal look like small beer.
So the minister’s effort was mainly to interfere in a more subtle way so that it doesn’t look like interference. The usual refrain is ‘we are intervening and not interfering’ which is very confusing for a lot of people even those employed by the government to make such claims.
FIFA though has over the years wised up to such deceptions and I think by now they have a whole Thesaurus that shows the close relationship between interfering and intervening. So they cannot be fooled by this anymore. It, however, got worse. FIFA then decided that Botswana is an increasingly rapid flashing light that should be monitored with great seriousness.
A whole delegation of FIFA has seemingly descended on our shores to try and unravel the mess. Now FIFA is the father of all football families around the world and if the father is called then that means the kids have been behaving very badly. FIFA possesses the power of a freight train in motion and so the whole nation is waiting with the proverbial bated breath because FIFA can just tell a whole country to stop playing football. If FIFA says we should stop playing football then there’s a whole new problem that the country would have to deal with.
The football ecosystem includes players and their wives, administrators and their wives, food vendors and their wives, airtime vendors and their wives, people selling suspicious bottled water and their wives, people selling 5 sticks of biltong at a hefty price and their wives.
So a whole ecosystem with little ecosystems attached to it could be negatively affected if daddy FIFA cracks the whip. As this saga plays out you get the feeling there is more stupidity than hydrogen in the universe and it has a much longer shelf life. To be brutally honest FIFA has to be fluent in IDIOT to be able to decipher and sort out the whole mess. Somewhere in West Africa there is a football spectacle pitting the cream of African footballers. You get the feeling that the tournament without the Zebras does not have that thing, that je ne sais quois.
Ok, I must admit the last trip out there in Equatorial Guinea was a huge embarrassment when the host’s cousins in the name of Guinea put a half dozen goals behind our hapless goalkeeper. My belief is we did not qualify because the officials are always busy fighting each other.
For Zebras to qualify everything has to be in place for Zebras to perform well because by their nature Zebras struggle to win matches even with an infusion of mouthwatering win bonuses. Nasty people from other countries have said Zebras aren’t exactly sure how to play football because we are still fighting the myriad of elephants that have encroached into areas where people live. This is a nasty thing to say because we are too petrified to fight elephants. I need Zebras to qualify for the next AFCON basically to be able to respond without any amount of egg in my face when my 9 year old son asks me ‘why are the Zebras not playing’. I have to answer this question every day and the little freeloader is not convinced by my answer. (For comments, feedback and insults email [email protected]) Thulaganyo Jankey is a Rapporteur and training consultant who runs his own training consultancy that provides training in BQA- accredited courses. His other services include registering consultancies with BQA and developing training courses. Contact him on 74447920 or email [email protected]
