Sunday shot

In whose interest does Malawi play football?

Sometimes you can get serious answers from seemingly silly questions like the one above.

As far as I am concerned, football in Malawi starts and ends on the pitch, which is quite a reversal of the standard practice in top football countries.

In Malawi, we have reduced football to merely kicking the ball.

In serious football countries, the game is played as hard as possible in the boardroom, hatching and ensuring futuristic policies to improve management/entreprenuership, coaching, social engagement and marketing.

Not in Malawi. Beyond players and coaches trying to make a living from football, it is difficult to point at the specific agenda of the country’s half-hearted investment in a game that, unless there is a revolution, we will never realise its undoubted potential.

The people to drive the local game forward are not the fans, coaches and the players but those at the hub of policy, power, politics and money.

But in the whole of Capital Hill, there is no one else beyond the Ministry of Sports and Youth with genuine sports/football agenda.

Parliamentary sessions only get to mention about football when there is yet another disastrous loss; which is nothing more than empty knee-jerk reaction. Mere noise in short.

Beyond that, the legislature and even the Executive have never been seriously interested in pushing for a specific football agenda.

Go to Malawi’s Wall Street, the Victoria Avenue, you can hardly pick anyone who matters with interested in football.

Go to Makata Industrial Area, Limbe or Kawale football is just another subject for chatting.

Scan through the manifestos of the political parties, past and present national policy agenda such as the Millenium Development Goals, Budget Consultations, GDP, Vision 20/20, Austerity Measures, Greenbelt initiative, Ovop etc, there is no mention of sports/football.

My conclusion is that while the masses love football, the people who matter and drive the national agenda have never been interested in this ‘trivia’, hence Malawi football will never develop.

Apart from hoping for results, yelling at players and referees in the terraces and kicking the ball, Malawi has no specific football agenda.

Unless the football authorities find a way of interesting the people who matter most in society, football shall continue to be largely followed but not largely invested in. It is a national strategy to say the least.

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