SOUL TO SOUL Of bans, blacklists & bola 5 By Edem Djokotoe. If I had to take Davison Mabvuto Zimba’s advice, last week’s column should have been my last. In a terse response to this series, he wrote: “Stop playing with dull peoples’ minds. Leave FAZ alone. Leave Zambians to handle their own affairs. Solve Accra issues.” Well, thanks for your mail, Davison. I will not speak on behalf of the “dull people” you refer to or the newspaper company that has been paying me to play with the minds of dull readers for almost 18 years. I can only speak for myself and, with your indulgence, I will put what I do into perspective for your benefit. In spite of my nationality, the Zambian government employed me in 1986 to teach Journalism at the Evelyn Hone College. And in the 10 years I held down that job, I taught the few hundred students I had during the period to be faithful to the principles of the profession, whatever the odds they would be up against. In the three decades I have lived and worked in Zambia,I have paid my taxes and made my professional contribution to the development of a country I consider my home and have friends, family, colleagues and numerous acquaintances in. It is some of these people you are calling “dull” because they do not to think as you do or are not inclined to shooting the messenger because they hate the sound of his message. But being the target of gunslingers intent on shooting the messenger has never deterred me from doing my job. If it did, I would have taken flight when Vice President George Kunda and Defence Minister, George Mpombo demanded in Parliament on 15 March 2007 that I be arrested and charged with sedition. My crime: writing a book on government spending over a 20-year period commissioned by Transparency International Zambia entitled Show Me The Money. Sedition carries with it a 20-year jail term—if one is found guilty and convicted. Thankfully, there were no grounds for arrest because the book was based was an accurate and factual analysis of a very public document: the Auditor’s General’s report. The controversy surrounding it notwithstanding, the book has found itself on the reading list for Development Studies students at the University of Zambia and the Zambia Open University. Instead of shooting this messenger, government, through the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting Services, has appointed me to the Access to Information Bill technical committee at a time when the masons at Football House are building stonewalls, blacklisting journalists and denying them access to information that should, to all intents and purposes, should be public property! So much for “playing with dull people’s minds”. Hopefully, this week, those dull minds should have no trouble wrapping their thoughts around the culture of financial impunity FAZ has been perpetuating over the years, fighting attempts to make it more transparent and accountable—in line with the letter of its own constitution. Let me start with the prize money from AFCON 2012. How much money did Zambian actually win? If I am asking, it is because there are contradictory accounts of the actual figure and plenty of speculation around it. It all started almost two years ago to the day, on March 24, when South African sports journalist and Super Sport Soccer Africa regular, Thomas Mokwena Kwenaite asked the question in an article on the programme’s online magazine: how much do AFCON winners take home? Actually, it was more to do with a statement he made which suggested that FAZ could have been economical with the truth about the prize money. He had written: “I tried to inquire from my Zambian comrades how much Chipolopolo earned to win the 29th edition of the African Nations Cup in Gabon. And I asked the question knowing full well that I am not going to get the answer I demanded. I expected conflicting statements, and indeed that is what I received. A few ventured to explain that they think Zambia received US$2 million; others were unsure and claimed they suspect it was a little less and amounted to probably US$1.5 million…” I couldn’t help chuckling when I first read Kwenaite’s public expression of scepticism when he published his piece two years ago. The question that immediately came to mind was this: does he know something about FAZ’s accountability and transparency record that we don’t? Why would he expect “conflicting statements” as a matter of course? Anyway, being a South African journalist means that he cannot be blacklisted for asking the questions he did, but his line of inquiry is a legitimate one, considering the contradictions about how much the prize money actually was. According to the CAF General Secretary, Morocco’s Hicham El-Amrami, Zambia received US$1.5 million as winners of AFCON out of the US$10 million allocated to the 16 teams that qualified for the competition, with runners-up Cote d’Ivoire going home with US$1 million. He was speaking on a Super Sport Soccer Africa TV programme where he appeared with FAZ President Kalusha Bwaya who said this in confirmation: “I took delivery of this cheque when we won the Nations Cup in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea. Which isn’t what FAZ General Secretary , George Kasengele said when he told the Zambia Daily Mail in an interview on 15 March 2012: “I want to make it clear that it is not US$2 million we will be given for winning the Africa Cup. The US$2 million is meant for the two finalists, so both Zambia and Ivory Coast will get US$1 million each.” How winners and runners-up walk away with the same amount in prize money simply doesn’t add up, especially given that CAF’s financial statement for the year shows that Zambia got 12 per cent of the total revenue while Cote d’Ivoire picked up 11 per cent. In short, two years on, no-one really knows what the real figure is. What I know is that the difference between US$1.5m and US$1m is US$500,000, which at the current rate of exchange would be K3,350,000, or before rebasing, K3.35 billion. A colossal amount by any standard, and just K197,880 short of FAZ’s annual budget for the year which ended on 31 December 2013 as submitted to government covering the various international engagements of the senior national soccer team, Chipolopolo. And talking about international engagements... One thing many people do not know about the money matters around international competitions like the Africa Cup is that the Confederation of African Football (CAF) has a long-standing regulation to refund participating countries their air fare bills for up to a contingent of 30 people and for money spent on preparations for three days before kick-off. CAF writes out a cheque for the total amount in US dollars in the name of the head of the delegation which only he can cash. That is because CAF, like FIFA, does not deal with governments but with football associations and so such refunds are paid this way, for some strange reason. Now, government, through the Ministry of Youth and Sports, provides “the logistical support (travelling and accommodation costs) and the payment of allowances and bonuses for players and the technical team of the senior national team for the international engagements at the request of the Football Association of Zambia”. In the case of AFCON 2012, government spent over K300 million of taxpayers’ money to fly the team to the competition—money which CAF confirms it has refunded. The air fare refund has not gone back to the national treasury, two years on. And this is not the only competition for which refunds have not been remitted to the State. Actually, the trend goes back many years. Anyway, even if the money is paid back to government, you’d think it would reflect on FAZ’s financial statement as revenue, even if it isn’t—just to provide some modicum of accountability. It doesn’t and never has. So on whose bank statements do these refunds appear? That, dear readers, is the question. Which raises yet another question. If perchance, someone took the trouble to go back 10 years to the various editions of the Africa Cup of Nations and find out in which delegation leaders name CAF wrote out refund cheques, what would he find? And what did they do with the money? Interestingly, the Office of the Auditor-General, which tries to safeguard the integrity of public money by providing constitutional oversight is unaware about the CAF provision which provides for the refund of air fares to competing nations. A senior auditor I spoke to did not even know that such a provision exists to help cash-strapped African governments to recover some of the money they spend on international competition. He admitted that the AG’s office has not audited FAZ directly for a long time, but said scrutiny of the Association’s receipt as well as expenditure of public money was undertaken indirectly through the Ministry of Youth and Sport from where it gets its “logistical support”. Which suggests that an undisclosed amount of public money slips through the cracks and disappears from the government radar screen every financial year—in much the same way as Malaysian Airlines Flight No. MH370 has. Without a trace. edjokotoe@yahoo
Posted on: Fri, 23 May 2014 05:08:26 +0000
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