The Sunday Mail
IF it were an action movie Makhosini Hlongwane would have walked away from the scene where Warriors coach Kallisto Pasuwa signed a new contract nonchalantly.
His face expressionless as he heads for the next hot spot in Zimbabwe’s sporting fraternity.
As Pasuwa and Zifa finally customised their union in Harare last week the Minister of Sport and Recreation was nowhere to be seen. However, his hand in getting the two parties onto the table cannot be ignored even as he so wishes.
“It’s good that Zifa and coach Pasuwa have agreed on a contract and as a Ministry we are happy with that.
“The Minister might have played some role but this is the job he was tasked to do by President Mugabe so there is no need for applause,” said Hlongwane.
He is being modest.
When Zifa took lunacy to legendary levels with their decision to fire Pasuwa as the Warriors prepared for the African Nations Championship the energetic Hlongwane weighed in decisively. He weighed in a manner his predecessor Andrew Langa would not have dared.
In a carefully worded statement Hlongwane, between the lines, told Philip Chiyangwa and his board to stop the charade.
The statement had the tone of a recommendation as Hlongwane was aware of the dangers posed by Fifa’s allergy towards Government interference in football administration.
But yet this was an instruction, an instruction Chiyangwa and his board followed to the letter.
The Pasuwa/Zifa tiff presented Hlongwane with his first real test and the youthful Minister came out with an enhanced reputation. And if anyone thought Hlongwane reserved his energies for the country’s most popular sport then they were wrong.
Since calling Zifa to order the hands on Minister has gone on to make his presence felt from bodybuilding to bowling, the swimming pool to the pool table.
It can be argued that for Hlongwane the only way was always going to be up after Langa’s disastrous stint.
However, the manner in which the upward trajectory has spiked in his first few months in office has left many convinced Makhosini is the man.
Langa was ever jovial but did not bring joy to the local sporting fraternity. He seemed detached from reality while his relationship with former Zifa president Cuthbert Dube appeared compromised. Langa stood aside and watched as Zifa degenerated from being a serious football association to a Mickey Mouse organisation whose headquarters resembled a war time building.
Langa saw no evil, heard no evil. In the meantime other sporting codes yearned for audience with him but he was nowhere to be found.
President Mugabe wrung some changes in September and up stepped Hlongwane.
He has been in office for just over four months but has met over a dozen sporting associations and has asked for an explanation on why the facilities that were built or refurbished for the 2014 Region V Games are looking like there were last attended to over a decade ago. The change in the way the Ministry of Sport and Recreation is doing business is there for all to see.
However, these positive changes will pale into insignificance if Hlongwane walks the talk with the new sports policy.
He is preaching the gospel of taking sport to the people.
Hlongwane says there is no reason why a kid in Nerutanga, Buhera should not get a chance to try their hand at hitting a cricket ball beyond those sacred mountains under a Zimbabwe Cricket funded programme.
Some sports are still elitist while the popular ones like football and netball are being played just for recreation in rural areas, he reckons. Last week he told golf associations to take the sport to the rural areas and successfully urged Prophet Magaya to continue with his project to build multipurpose sports facility because “we need more facilities if our sector is to grow.”
“My short stint at the Ministry of Sport and Recreation has revealed deep structural faults within the pillars of what should be a solid sport and recreation sector.
“The absence of clear and deliberate institutional interventions by Government, our national sports associations and our social partners as we well as local authorities has hemorrhaged and created a blind spot, fogging our ability to fully exploit the latent potential that is resident in our sport and recreation industry,” said Hlongwane. Hlongwane appreciates that his drive to have bowls played in Bulilamangwe will rub some sections the wrong way but he is in no mood to make apologies.
“You cannot tell me that there is no kid who is good enough to take over from Kirsty Coventry in these rural areas. . . there is abundant talent and all we need to do is identify, nurture and retain that talent.
“The yawning structural deficits and crevices in the sport and recreation sector are denying is the much needed mass participation at the bottom of the pyramid and has perpetuated a continued trajectory of failure in terms of podium performance,” he said.
