The Asiagate scandal has been top news for the past week in the daily papers. The publicity given to this story sounded like this scandal just popped out all of sudden with the visit by Sepp Blatter, world soccer governing body FIFA president. To think of it, these acts of corruption and bribery actually happened a year and some months ago and nobody said a thing about it. It seems like the custodians of sports in this country had their attention diverted to the jostling for positions to govern the Zimbabwe Football Authority (ZIFA). Every wanna be sports writer in this country has made a name out of this story in the past month.

One of my work mates asked me what this “Asiagate” thing was all about. I had no specific answer to that question but only to say “it’s a bunch of soccer crooks that went overseas on match fixing tours and soliciting bribes”. I had no guts to call them soccer players/ officials because what these people did is a disgrace to the nation. The manner in which the report on the Asia tour was produced is scandalous on its own. There is now finger pointing and blame shifting even involving media personnel. But the most surprising thing is that the mastermind of this scandal was arrested and sentenced to two years in prison in Finland yet here in Zimbabwe it is still just news with no arrests. One may suggest that perhaps the people involved in this story are all overseas like the guy arrested in Finland but take a casual visit to town and you can bump into one of the fellows. Since no arrests have been made it really looks like the media reports were just for publicity in preparation for the visit by Sepp Blatter.

This entry was posted on July 25th, 2011 at 2:28 pm by Lenard Kamwendo and is filed under Media, Reflections, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.