A good eight years might have passed, but I still remember the incident with fond memories.
Malawi’s popular football club, Big Bullets [then Bakili Bullets] were travelling to Nigeria for a CAF Champions League assignment and I was privileged to be in the delegation.
One member of the delegation was supposed to be a Football Association of Malawi (FAM) executive member.
It was not his first time to travel, but perhaps for some reasons, he was so excited that when the rest of the team was checking in ready to fly out from Chileka International Airport, this gentleman was busy at the car park with his family jotting down shoe sizes for his children so that he could buy them new ones in Abuja.
Alas! The plane left him behind and in a state of confusion, he asked one of the authorities at the airport to phone the ‘driver’ so that she should ‘reverse’ and come to pick him up. To make matters worse, this gentleman—whether classic exaggeration or a fact—is reported to have refused to take his breakfast at home earlier on, telling his wife that: ‘Amama ndikadya za mu ndege mumakhala zankhwilu kwabasi!’
I always laugh whenever I remember the incident, sadly though, the gentleman in question, passed on.
So, last Thursday’s decision by Council of Southern Africa Netball Associations (Cosana) to postpone at the 11th hour its tournament that was scheduled for Swaziland, reminded me of that funny incident.
According to Netball Association of Malawi (NAM) president Rosy Chinunda, the Queens advance party was already on its way to Kamuzu International Airport to fly to Johannesburg en route to Swaziland.
Probably, just like the departed FAM gentleman, members of the Queens advance party had already taken shoe sizes for their loved ones only to be told at the airport that their trip was not on.
Probably, the NAM officials also did not have their breakfast believing they would have a delicious one aboard a South African Airways plane.
At the end of it all, I hope Cosana will take a hard-line on countries that pulled out of the tournament at the 11th hour leading to the postponement of the event. More so, when our Queens had spent a lot of energy and resources preparing for the showcase. Uloliwe..Uloliwe! uloliwe wayidudula hi..nang’esiza! [the train is pushing!]
