“…the support eventually came but it came late…”
By Dorrothy Moyo| The Minister Of Sport, Kirsty Coventry has confirmed that the Zimbabwe Netball team members were abused during their stay at the WorldCup when they got to the point of failing to buy ankle-support shoes and their coach was found having a paltry £30 for the team’s training needs.
There was also a shortfall of $39,000.
This was all caused by the Netball President Leticia Chipandu who strained the players’ fund by adding to the expenses, tickets and allowances for people not at all associated with the netball team.
The corruption was exclusively exposed by ZimEye 4 days before the gems had flown to the UK when the Sports and Recreation Commission claimed only 26 people were traveling to the UK, when it actual fact over 54 were on the players’ bill, as revealed by ZimEye.com.
Coventry was speaking to the Gems at a breakfast meeting held in their honour Harare Thursday, Kirsty when she said support for the Gems came too late.
ZimEye which pursued Chipandu for weeks, eventually pushed for a breakthrough at the weekend after this news network’s Simba Chikanza pressured her for answers. WATCH THE VIDEO BELOW:
Meanwhile, speaking today Minister Coventry said, “we are working on being able to present something to you to show you our appreciation that will be coming in the next few weeks,” Coventry said.
“We will have some other exciting things to make sure that we show you our gratitude and appreciation for all your hard work,”
“I would like to take this opportunity to say that moving forward, we saw and I remember when you first qualified, came to your first training last year, we started to have conversations around the support you would need and I think at the end of the day the support eventually came but it came late and I think moving there will be more communication especially through the Sports Recreation Commission (SRC), and through the board and through the national federation, putting in a timely manner the events that they have coming up, the funding that they would need, the support that they would need from us because at the end of the day we want to try and make sure our sports across Zimbabwe are more professional,” she said.
Despite the admission by Coventry, Chipandu did not at all apologise to the team and only said,
“I sincerely want to thank the government of Zimbabwe for making it possible for the Gems to go to the World Cup by supporting them financially otherwise it wouldn’t have been possible without the support of our government through the SRC.”