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When two elephants fight, the grass suffers the most

2020-03-06  Carlos Kambaekwa

When two elephants fight, the grass suffers the most

Let me take this opportunity to welcome and congratulate Ranga Haikali for landing football’s plum position following his election as president of the Namibia Football Association (NFA), after what turned out to be a one-horse race for the presidency.

If pedigree is anything to go by, Haikali has certainly proven himself as an astute football administrator during his near faultless stint with incumbent Namibian champions Black Africa Football Club. Modern football requires blokes with business acumen, and the Kuisebmond lad surely fits the bill perfectly well.
Now, let’s get the ball rolling starting with the inactivity in the lower divisions – the Archilles heel or rather orphans of Namibian football.  As it stands, there is an urgent need to map out tangible structures and this can only be done through a complete revamp of the lower tier leagues’ current structures. We need to revisit the demarcation of our lower tier leagues if we are to level the playing field in terms of fairness and affordability. 

Given our tricky geographic layout, the lower division teams have been unavoidable victims of marathon fixture congestion, travelling long distances to honour their league assignments – notwithstanding their skeleton budgets.

You can’t have football teams travelling all the way from Lüderitz to honour league fixtures in Karasburg, Aroab, Grunau or Keetmanshoop for that matter. 

It should be noted that footballers are not robots. They are human beings and need to be accorded recovery periods and cannot be expected to perform at their level best after travelling such long distances by road, nogal crammed in sub-standard travelling mode like sardines in fish cans. Same applies to teams campaigning in the vast Kunene region.

Back to the real McCoy, the “so called suspended” MTC Namibia Premier League (NPL). Yours truly was actually shocked to learn that 20 out of the 22 representatives voted in favour of the NPL’s “illegal suspension”. Is this a mere coincidence that the numbers tie perfectly in with those who voted in favour of Haikali? I’m just wondering. 

Yours truly still maintains that the country’s football governing organ (NFA) erred big time to ground its most valuable affiliate... thus in the process killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. 
As the legitimate presiding football body, it is within the NFA’s jurisdiction to charge the league for misconduct and subsequent sanctions. NFA should not hide behind a trumped-up ostensible directive from the world’s football governing body Fifa. 

The latter merely sanctioned a well-orchestrated misleading recommendation by the trigger-happy NFA Normalisation Committee (NC). I’m publicly challenging the NFA/NC to publish the letter written to Fifa for divine intervention.

Anyway, that put aside, I’m not the kind of bloke that dwells on things; let us roll up the sleeves and put our differences aside for the sake of football whilst considering the plight of poor footballers – the real custodians of the game. 

My humble advice to the NPL top brass is nothing is iron-cast, swallow your pride, heed the “cooked” Fifa directives, smoke the peace pipe and let football be the winner. I rest my case. 


2020-03-06  Carlos Kambaekwa

Tags: Khomas
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