It was a good day at the office for Zambia’s Chipolopolo as they defeated Algeria 3-1 on Saturday. Congratulations FAZ and the boys for a fine performance.
The victory should have passed without any distraction. That awkward moment reappeared when the cameras zoomed in on Zambian defender Stophilla Sunzu.
Inscriptions on Sunzu’s jersey were dropping, literally. No one should seek to dilute that victory with anything else, but we have to face it. Mafro is a failed project.
The sooner we admit Mafro has ripped us off the better we can recover from this raw deal.
Let’s look at it this way. Zambia is 2012 Africa Cup champion, 2017 Africa U-20 champions and FIFA World Cup 2017 quarter finalists. The same Under-20 carry the COSAFA 2016 champions tag. Zambia is also Under-17 COSAFA champions (2017). Add 2017 COSAFA Senior Challenge runners up and 2018 African Nations Championship (CHAN) finalists. That’s not an average curriculum vitae.
And to end up with a kit supplier that is not ticking should worry us all. The Sunzu moment was nothing, but a very awkward moment with the potential to dent our image. It had nothing to do with the type of screen printing. A poor-quality outfit cannot be easily decorated.
Three months into the Mafro deal, the best the Singapore company could do for us is throw a jersey in our direction that make us look like a double orphan.
Coming to replicas, the streets of Zambia were littered with fong-kong.
There is no better moment to cash in on national team paraphernalia than when Chipolopolo is hosting such big matches.
With a game as huge a profile as Algeria in a World Cup qualifier, FAZ missed an opportunity to maximise on revenue.
Selling a minimum of 50, 000 (the capacity of Heroes) replica jerseys at K100 could easily have given FAZ at least K5 million revenue. We let it pass.
Congratulations to those genius entrepreneurs who littered Lusaka and other places with the unauthorised substitutes that helped us celebrate the win. It made us stand out in the absence of the ‘genuine’ replica.
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