Delusional defiance leads to destructive docking of points
● Let this be a stern warning that exploitation without compensation shall not be tolerated. Not now. Not ever.
Let this be a salutation to the South African Football Players Union (Safpu) for fighting for the rights of a footballer and flooring the antagonist.
Before you blurt what is Blackbone going on about, let me put this column into context. The antagonists are AmaZulu, the football club my uncle Langa has such a strong allegience to he would happily give an arm and a leg in its defence. A few years back AmaZulu terminated the contract of Phinheas Nambandi.
Mind you, the agreement of employment between the two parties still had three years to run. Three years!
Confronted by this exploitation, Namibian national Nambandi took the case of the wrongful termination of his contract to Safpu.
As the champion of the rights of players, the union engaged AmaZulu to pay Nambandi what was due to him. Their pleas fell on defiantly deaf ears.
A year later, Safpu’s efforts continued to fall on infertile ground. Usuthu were unmoved. Undettered, Safpu brought the matter to the attention of world football governing body Fifa in 2016.
All Nambandi wanted was R300,000 to make ends meet. R300,000!
When the dispute reached the residents of the Zurich HQ, the Fifa disciplinary committee found in favour of Nambandi in 2017.
The Durban club was ordered to pay “R1,086m as compensation for breach of contract within 30 days from the date of notification of the decision, plus 5% interest per annum, as from July 25
2014”. They were also ordered to settle the bill in relation to costs and expenses incurred in connection with the arbitration proceedings.
AmaZulu, in their warped wisdom, must have thought the ruling was a segment from the Blacks Only Comedy fiesta. They laughed off the judgment.
In between their dismissive smirks, Usuthu took the Fifa DC decision, which was handed down on August 10, on appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS). The joke is on them now that the fiesta has become an expensive fiasco.
Feeding the stereotype of Zulu people being a strong-headed and stubborn lot, AmaZulu defied the decision. This delusional defiance has led to a dilapidating docking of six points which has sunk Usuthu to tailenders status with only one point to show after six matches.
When our journalist Tiisetso Malepa asked AmaZulu general manager Lunga Sokhela if he was not worried at all that Fifa via Safa may just as well go ahead to enforce the CAS decision, he gave the following response:
“We are well aware that Fifa might not want to hear anything after this ruling, and they will probably do that. But at the same time, that’s why we’ve got the courts. We are protected by the law and by the courts. It’s a shame that Fifa has this mentality where they just don’t care about the laws of certain countries and think they are God. They want to be the supreme law of the world.
“In SA, we think our courts are more than capable of dealing with this issue. It will not be accepted in SA that you have bodies like Fifa that just come here and rubbish our laws and our constitution.
It’s final and binding in their minds. At the end of the day, we are in SA. You can’t just come here and do as you please. There is the law which has to be respected. Football matters don’t belong in court? CAS and Fifa, and whoever, have only got jurisdiction over sporting bodies. We as Lyrastar Investments don’t know Mr Nambandi . We’ve never had any dealing with the guy. The guy had dealings with AmaZulu Football Club Pty Ltd, which is a company that is no longer in sport. So Fifa, CAS [and] what what cannot just dictate and cannot come to us and order us around. They have no basis to come to us because the owners are not the same.”
Lord have mercy.
AmaZulu thought the decision was a segment from the Blacks Only Comedy fiesta