When the country is already mourning the pathetic show of the Flames in the Cosafa Castle Cup, our esteemed parastatal, Escom, wants to inflict on us more misery, if a rumour that they plan to close its football ground in Blantyre is anything to go by.<\/p>\n
It is reported that the brick fenced ground, which has been operational for decades, will turn into a storage facility.<\/p>\n
This is an illustration of how things are slowly getting bad in relation to the declining football standards in the country.<\/p>\n
It does not require rocket science to know that this decision will worsen the problem of shortage of football grounds in the city.<\/p>\n
Despite decorated as a the country\u2019s commercial city, Blantyre has very few football grounds which are used by both Super League,PremierDivision, Youth and women teams.<\/p>\n
The city has only one reliable play ground that hosts Super League games; Kamuzu Stadium which is also in dilapidated state.<\/p>\n
Some teams prefer using Balaka and Kalulu stadiums as their home grounds, which means they travel about 100 kilometres away from the city.<\/p>\n
Most lower league teams have no choice but to use Escom and BAT grounds despite being in bad shape.<\/p>\n
Escom publicist, Kitty Chingota, was quoted in the media as saying Escom Football Ground is a private property as such the parastatal is at liberty to decide how best to make use of it.<\/p>\n
Probably, what Escom management forgets is that it is a public entity. By public entity it means that it is run on tax payers. Already Escom has been a pain to many souls.<\/p>\n
They have been unreasonably increasing electricity tariffs which have made most of us poorer than before and the only solace Blantyre residents have is that our kids go to this dilapidated pitch to play football during weekends.<\/p>\n
It is, therefore,surprising that instead of using the ground for its intended purpose they want to turn it into a storage ground. This is the mentality that has killed Malawi football and such decisions have painted the image of our game gloomy.<\/p>\n
Before making that decision, Escom should get a leaf from Zambia\u2019s electricity supply corporation, Zesco, on how it is developing football in that country.<\/p>\n
While Escom is busy killing teams and closing infrastructure, Zesco is busy bankrolling a top league side and building magnificent sports complex.<\/p>\n
No wonder Zambia football is developed.It must be told uncertain terms that it is the duty of our parastatals to help the government to preserve the beauty of the game instead of crushing it with a sledge hammer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When the country is already mourning the pathetic show of the Flames in the Cosafa Castle Cup, our esteemed parastatal, Escom, wants to inflict on us more misery, if a rumour that they plan to close its football ground in Blantyre is anything to go by. It is reported that the brick fenced ground, which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":19700,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26846","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26846","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=26846"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26846\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26848,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26846\/revisions\/26848"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=26846"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=26846"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.times.mw\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=26846"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}