In a few days gone, I read in some leading newspaper, that some concerned football fanatics paraded themselves in front of camera to agitate for current Football Association of Malawi (FAM) President to pave way, having presided over the affairs of Malawi’s football for a good nineteen years.
As some ‘undecorated football writer’, I chose to objectively reflect on such calls that have been synonymous in general with leaders that have overstayed in power.
I begin from a curious phenomenon. From the outside, being FAM president does not look like much fun. The pressure is constant. The workload is never manageable.
Your every action is scrutinized and critiqued, and it is impossible to please everybody. When a national team underperforms, you take the blame, when it finally wins, the players and coaches are all praised.
Being FAM president is undeniably never an easy job. So why does anyone want to do it? And why do they want to keep doing it, more and more?
Agreed, Malawi’s football is work in progress. This is a house that continuously needs artisans to keep perfecting its tattered shape. The standards have not been impressive.
There has been undeniably stunted growth in the game. Comparatively, key growth performance indicators show a huge decline. All matters being squarely equal, the Walter Nyamilandu Manda regime, has operated in an environment which has seen a huge global investment in football by FIFA.
It has largely benefitted from a transformative period that has seen a transition of football from a merely social activity to a business magnet hub, and money spinning tool.
It has not been very surprising that the regime managed to make a few face-lifting in sporting infrastructure, undesirably though, not adequate. If we make a holistic comparison from our neighbours within the region, it is evidently seen that the regime has done very little in the technical growth of the game.
The Malawi National football the Flames, the face of our football, has not consistently performed to the desired levels that speaks volume of every other progressive measure in our football in general.
It appears the only “Progress” that the Walter Nyamilandu Manda regime knows has been holding shrewd elective assemblies to stay at the helm.
The reality that progress is a wider concept governed by a framework called strategic planning is yet to sink in. In similar fashions of old, when pressed on a live Super Sport Program whether he will contest in the December elective assembly, the FAM president was very elusive. ‘I will wait for the people to decide’.
Such is the leadership that has created an atmosphere where the incumbent President is glorified as the only nature’s finest gift, and in a scripted pattern, without Walter there is no Football Association of Malawi.
As this is happening, the principal beneficiary seems quiet, purporting to be uninterested, yet stoking the fires from behind.
If Walter Nyamilandu Manda is truly the only person who can lead Football Association of Malawi for another bickering record twenty years plus, without a succession plan, then truly he has miserably failed to run the association.
Nyamilandu reminds ordinary folks of a steam engine that is gathering speed as it approaches its final destination.
From his seat of authority surrounded by four magnificent courtiers who tells him exactly what his ears are prepared to absorb, he is reckoned and granted another free ride to another round of four years.
How that is possible in a country of over 20 million people is hard to imagine.
As one football enthusiast rightly put it in 2014 that, “the ship is sinking and we must change the captain lest we drown.
We need new leaders to try and change the mindset and influence government to invest more in football.” Indeed Walter has failed to do so in the past 19 years! It is time to go, Mr President, honestly it is!
