Opinion: Of Bans, Blacklists & Bola 3 Football House has a secret weapon for dealing with journalists whose coverage of soccer it does not like. The weapon is called Accreditation. In the language of sports, this is the prerogative to grant official authorisation to a journalist to report an event or series of events. Accreditation gives journalists access to the game as well as the license to roam anywhere from training camps, dressing rooms to the hotels where teams are booked as well as permission to interview players, coaching staff before and after matches. Official authorisation can be granted for events ranging from league games to big international competitions like the World Cup. It is this institutional prerogative that FAZ has persistently used to prevent blacklisted sports reporters from covering soccer in Zambia in recent years. And if they can’t cover soccer, they can’t be a thorn in the Association’s side,criticising, investigating, holding it accountable for its actions and questioning its excesses. Of course, since 2005, FAZ has denied the existence of a blacklist, insisting it is nothing more than a myth perpetrated by its detractors to give the Association a bad name. So I hope the mandarins at Football House will not mind when I publish an e-mail its former Communications Manager Erick Mwanza wrote to ZNBC’s Head of Sport, Dominic Chimanyika on August 20 last year to substantiate my claim. It reads in part: “Afternoon. Email well received. We have proceeded to produce the accreditation cards and these will be given out on Friday at the stadium at 15:00hours. “However, Mr Matimba Nkonje will not be accredited and therefore will not be granted access to the stadium to work in any areas. This is because your request to Football House to review his situation and work ethic which brought the name of the game and its leadership into disrepute, ridicule and scandalised the image of the game has not received favourable consideration. FAZ and its match agents, security and match organising teams will therefore be briefed to continue barring him from Zambia league and international matches. “While Mr Nkonje’s case is still being reviewed, we suggest you nominate other television commentators …to handle the matches now and going forward. A letter from the Association will be delivered on the same. Best regards…” I asked Nkonje to confirm the ban and to tell me exactly what he said or did that “brought the name of the game and its leadership into disrepute, ridicule and scandalised the image of the game” but he refused to talk about it. However, insiders say he incurred the wrath of FAZ when he allegedly criticised then national team coach Renard’s tactics in an international match Zambia was playing in his commentary, but I have not been able to independently verify this. So I turned my attention to the other blacklisted journalists who had no problem speaking on record. One of them is Augustine Mukoka, the former Post reporter FAZ President, Kalusha Bwalya slapped at the Cape Town International Convention Centre on 4 December 2009. He explained how FAZ has used accreditation to punish journalists like him.“When the accreditation process for the FIFA 2010 World Cup in South Africa started, I applied through FAZ. There were only five slots allotted to Zambia because the national team didn’t qualify for the competition. Three of those slots were meant for daily newspapers and the other two for broadcasting stations that did not have any partnership for the 2010 event. FAZ rejected my application and completely ignored my submission through its media office and let the deadline for accreditation pass. That’s how I wrote to FIFA and explained the situation to them. Eventually, the FIFA media office gave me my accreditation.” Another sports journalist on the blacklist, Sydney Mungala, narrated what he has had to go through over the past two years at the hands of the Association. He said on June 2013, he and three other journalists, Kaluminana Kalumiana, Francis Alusheke and Darius Kapembwa were arrested and charged with espionage and criminal trespass for covering a training session of the national team at Levy Mwanawasa Stadium ahead of a training match against Division One North side, Nkwiza in preparation for Zambia’s 2014 World Cup qualifier against Lesotho. The police recorded a warn and caution statement from the four. Says Mungala: “We were there with the full blessing of the technical team. From nowhere, police officers arrived and said they had received instructions from Football House to arrest us. They herded us into the police post, ordered to remove our shoes and belts, hand over our phones and other valuables and sit on the floor. At this point, the officers kept making phone calls to some FAZ official for further instructions while Officer Sylvester Shipolo, then in charge of national team security, tried to get transport to take us down to Ndola Central Police Station. After about close to an hour, the police released us.” Mungala says the last straw for him was when FAZ denied him accreditation for the 2013 Africa Cup. “With CAF, as long as you have your press pass and passport, you can get the permission you need to cover their events. But in this case, someone at Football House was given the task of accrediting local journalists but he chose to deny me mine. I contacted CAF after all my colleagues got their accreditation and I hadn’t received mine but they couldn’t give me an answer. I decided to travel anyway, even though as a freelancer, spending my own money to get there was a big risk,” he said. Mungala said he later discovered that FAZ had discredited him to CAF and made it clear it didn’t want him in at the Africa Cup. In the end, the CAF officials used their discretion to accredit him to cover the 2013 Africa Cup. When it comes to being blacklisted and discredited in the line of duty by FAZ, Kennedy Gondwe, the local BBC sports correspondent, knows it all too well. He explained in an interview how the Football Association of Zambia caused him to lose a source of income as a correspondent for Super Sport. “One day, I appeared on Super Sport’s Soccer Africa programme as a guest. The programme had nothing to do with FAZ or about Zambian football, but at some point I was asked about a player called Given Singuluma. They wanted to know where he came from, how he made his name and so on. Shortly, after the show, Super Sport told me to stop contributing sports stories from Zambia. When I asked why, they said they’d had received information from FAZ that I was not in good standing with the Association and shouldn’t be allowed to continue,” he said. Gondwe said when he met Max Shinungwa, the Soccer Africa Editor last year at Holiday Inn, he was told “in no uncertain terms” to go mend fences with FAZ and apologise to the mandarins at Football House. “I asked him what exactly I’d done to warrant this and he said there were stories about FAZ I’d done Football House didn’t like. So I told Shinungwa: as my editor, every story I have ever done from Zambia, you have gone through and passed, meaning that editorially, they met Super Sports’ standards. So I don’t understand how you can turn around and say there were bad just because FAZ has complained. Anyway, I refused to apologise to FAZ because as far as I am concerned, I have done nothing wrong,” Gondwe said. He added that FAZ made several calls to the BBC to complain about his reporting. One particular story, he recalls, was about Kalusha Bwalya apologising to government for refusing to appear before a National Sports Council disciplinary committee to answer charges relating to the transfer of a minor, Emmanuel Mayuka, from Kabwe Warriors to the Israeli club side, Maccabee Tel-Aviv in 2008. Warriors accused FAZ of issuing an International Transfer Certificate without the club’s consent, which prompted government to direct National Sports Council to investigate the matter. But Kalusha refused to appear before the Council, saying FAZ had reported the matter to FIFA to resolve. So much for background. Says Gondwe: “My boss at the BBC, Farayi Mungazi, called me up and said I have just received a phone call from the FAZ President saying he never apologised to government as you reported. I told Farayi that that story was in the public domain and every single daily newspaper had reported it. In fact, the national broadcaster, ZNBC, had even carried the story on the main news of Kalusha apologising to the Council, the public and the Sports Minister. He asked me to get original cuttings of those reports plus video footage from ZNBC and send them to London. When they received the cuttings and the video clip in London, they were shocked to find he actually publicly apologised!” He said even BBC’s support for him didn’t go down too well with the FAZ president who reportedly told Mungazi that as long as Kennedy Gondwe remained a correspondent, he would not deal with him. “But the BBC stood firm and said: no one can dictate who it can or cannot employ…” Which brings me to the question: where will all this end? I may not have an answer, but I know that the vengefulness currently possessing soccer administration like an evil spirit isn’t helping the beautiful game. Source: Edem’s Soul to Soul zambiareports/2014/05/09/opinion-bans-blacklists-bola-3/
Posted on: Fri, 09 May 2014 06:43:35 +0000
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