Lesson from Simba

By Robson Sharuko

Tanzania’s richest man Mohamed Dewji is laying the groundwork to transform one of the country’s biggest football clubs, Simba SC, into a fully professional side after acquiring about 51 percent stake in the team.

And Malawian football agent, Felix Sapao, believes this could be a route which domestic football giants, Dynamos and Highlanders, who have a similar background to Simba SC, must take to enable the two clubs to realise their full potential.

Dweji, who turns 43 on May 8 this year, is the only Tanzanian billionaire and has turned around the fortunes of his family business into a gigantic company in the East African country where it employs more than 28 000 people and has footprints across the entire society.

He intends to ensure that his company gets revenue in excess of $5 billion in two years’ time and he has a vision of employing more than 100 000 people across Africa.

A life-long Simba SC fan, he completed the acquisition of the majority of the shares of the Dar-es-Salaam giants recently, and has now undertaken an ambitious programme to transform them into a fully-fledged professional outfit which he wants to one day be crowned champions of Africa.

Simba SC have revealed that the reforms which Dweji, who has more than 534 000 followers on Twitter and is a keen football fan who usually posts images of himself among fans at stadiums cheering his beloved Simba SC, wants to see at the team will start in June this year.

That could be the culmination of a quest to take control of the club which started two years ago when he first made public his intention to transform Simba SC by pouring in about $10 million for the acquisition of majority stake in the club.

“Simba fans need to see their club winning top honours and it is important that we recruit top quality players, hire outstanding coaches and if we set aside 4bn/- per season, we will certainly be an edge above our competitors — Young Africans and Azam FC,” he told a media conference then.

“I want to see Simba win CAF Champions League title. Our club which is due to celebrate its 80th anniversary on August 8th, this year, is not supposed to be where it is at the moment, running four seasons without winning the league title is unacceptable.’’

Simba SC have yet to win the league title in Tanzania since 2012 when they won the last of their 18 league championships as the arrival of a number of cash-rich clubs, as is the case in Zimbabwean football today where the financial muscle of the platinum miners is now producing big football institutions, has curtailed their success story.

Until the businessman’s involvement, Simba SC were owned by an unstructured and informal group of club members and supporters in what is like a carbon copy of the ownership of Dynamos, which remains in the hands of the club’s founding fathers, who are not able to provide the club with the financial investment needed for them to compete with the rising giants.

Recently, DeMbare have been strugling to meet the demands of their Cameroonian star Christian Epoupa leading to the collapse of their relationship amid reports that the forward, who claims he is owed a substantial amount of money by his employers, has head turned by an approach from Ngezi Platinum Stars.

Simba SC claim to have 10 million fans in Tanzania where they have a huge support base and their Derby against Young Africans is one of the biggest matches, in terms of crowd attendance, across the continent. They reached the 1974 African Cup of Club Champions semi-finals, the best run by a Tanzanian club in Africa’s flagship inter-club tournament, but have fallen off the pace in recent years.

Simba SC were founded in 1936 by a group of community leaders in Dar es Salaam but, in recent years, just like Dynamos, they have struggled for funding with serious cash-flow issues blighting their progress. Their main rivals, Young Africans, are owned by local businessman Yusuf Manji while the new kid on the bloc, Azam FC, are owned by multi-millionaire businessman, Said Bakhresa.

The arrival of Dewji on the scene is expected to change fortunes for Simba SC and already they have shown that times are changing for the better by getting the services of Frenchman, Pierre Lechantre, who won the 2000 Nations Cup with Cameroon, as their coach.

Sapao, who has considerable interest in Zimbabwean football and has also worked in the backroom of five-time African champions TP Mazembe, says what is happening at Simba SC could also be used as a model for Dynamos and Highlanders.

‘’So, If Dynamos can do as what Simba has done, financially, they would be stable and I would recommend they do so,’’ Sapao told The Herald yesterday.

‘’If some billionaire offers $10+ million with a bank guarantee that will not fold within the agreed period and use the interest incurred for the club annual budget, it could change things in a big way. What Simba Sports Club are doing is to solve their perennial problem of not having enough money and going begging to get sponsors.

‘’Orlando Pirates solved their problem as well. There are different ways about how financial stability can be brought to football clubs, especially in territories where marketing rates are low, and a sponsorship cannot sustain the annual budget of a club.’’ The Herald