The real match that needs fixing……

By Luke Tamborinyoka

The current national story is about the match-fixing scandal that has rocked the country and that has fingered big names in this embarrassing crusade to contrive and pre-determine the outcomes of football matches.

Big names in football, including ZIFA board member Edzai Kasinauyo have been embroiled in this scandal.

Disgraced former ZIFA chief executive officer Henrietta Rushwaya, at the centre of a match-fixing scandal dubbed Asiagate a few years ago, is once again fingered in the plot to rig results of football matches in a scam that is extending even into matches in the ABSA Premiership in South Africa.

Zimbabweans generally love soccer. We all remember our childhood days, kicking the plastic ball in the high density suburbs and in the patchy grounds in our rural areas.

For some of us, football has become the sport of our unbridled affinity. In my case, my adoration stretches from my beloved national team, the Warriors in Zimbabwe, Dynamos football club, my beloved Arsenal in north London, Barcelona in Spain and Borussia Dortmund in the Bundesliga.

Like most Zimbabweans, every other day I watch this wonderful spot where grown up men—and even women nowadays—spend an entire afternoon chasing an inflated animal skin around the open vlei!

We all appear to be shocked that patriotic sons and daughters of this land could muster the audacity to fix football matches.

Well, some of us are not shocked.

Indeed, we are nation of match-fixers, be they political or sporting matches!

We have fudged figures in our national elections from the year 2 000; that is why we have regionally and internationally become famous for rigging elections. We may pretend that we are hearing it all for the first time when it happens in sport, but in all honesty, the story of Zimbabwean politics is a sad story of match-fixing.

We hear the match-fixing cabal wanted to rig the forthcoming Zimbabwe-Swaziland match for a 2-0 outcome. We have seen it before.

In 2008, the national political match was rigged in broad daylight and Morgan Tsvangirai was robbed of an outright victory.

On 14 April, 2008, in the five weeks that the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission (ZEC) failed to announce results, I was part of a six-member MDC team that attended an extra-ordinary summit at Mulungushi conference hall in the Zambian capital of Lusaka.

We all did not know the actual results then, but it was clear to every Zimbabwean that the MDC had won the election and Tsvangirai had trounced Robert Mugabe. But wonder of wonders, in that hall on that sunny afternoon, former South Africa President Thabo Mbeki told the gathered SADC Heads of State that the dispute of the election would be solved in the run-off! It was clear that the national political match had already been fixed!

Everyone was shocked! Nobody was even aware of the results of the first round, but the so-called mediator was talking of a run-off in an election whose results were yet to be announced.

But of course, Mugabe himself was to tell us in 2014 that Tsvangirai won that election by 73 percent.

For those of us in the MDC, political-match-fixing has been our regular experience since this great party was formed 17 years ago! There is nothing new here!

In football, we called it Asiagate a few years ago because of the involvement of shadowy characters from that region who have appear to have returned again to haunt our favorite national sport. In our political match in 2013, it was Nikuv-gate, masterminded by an Israeli company of that name that was paid about $12 million without the knowledge of the Minister of Finance for services that remain unexplained to this day.

The $15 billion diamond revenue, whose whereabouts we seem not to be able to explain as a nation, was used to fix our own political match in 2013. We in the MDC know and have produced a public report of how the Chiadzwa diamonds were sold through emissaries in Angola to raise funds that were then used to fund Nikuv.

We have become a shameful people known for fudging, not just our sporting and political matches. Even the so-called beauty of our women has become a fudged outcome; indeed fake appearances contrived through lightening creams and horse hair!

What is only real is the national suffering and starvation facing the people. As a country, we are in the throes of a serious economic crisis. Zimbabweans are playing an onerous survival match; selling wares and doing anything that can earn them a dollar. We are all engaged in a gruelling match with poverty and starvation.

If we have become experts in match-fixing as a nation, it is this shameful match of survival in our streets that really needs to be sorted by a caring government!

Indeed, that is the real match that needs fixing!

Luke Tamborinyoka doubles as the spokesperson to MDC leader Morgan Tsvangirai and Director of Communications in the Movement for Democratic Change.