By winning the 28th edition of the Africa Cup of Nations, Zambia has become only the second Southern African country to do so after South Africa hosted and won the 1996 fiesta. It is no mean feat performed by the Zambian senior football team, the Chipolopolo. It took them 55 years to achieve this result.
Besides, the continental conquest came 19 years after the tragic loss of a generation of their finest players off the coast of Libreville, Gabon, where the plane carrying the team, bound for a World Cup qualifying match in Senegal, plunged into the sea. Incidentally, the only survivor of that generation of players, skipper Kalusha Bwalya, led a second string side to the final of the 1994 edition in Tunisia, narrowly losing 2-1 to Nigeria’s Super Eagles.
Apart from their robust display characteristic of the African spirit and soccer tradition, the Chipolopolo showed a rare determination and technical depth, a result of years of focused planning and commitment. They succeeded against all odds, beating the overwhelming favourites, the Elephants of Cote d’Ivoire, 7-6 on penalties, in a pulsating encounter the sort that was last seen at the 2002 finals between Cameroon and Senegal.
Remarkably, the Zambians achieved the conquest of the continent with predominantly domestic league-based players. Just four members of the 23-man squad ply their trade outside Africa: 2 in Europe – 20-year-old midfielder Chisamba Lungu plays for Russian first division side Ural Oblast while lively forward Emmanuel Mayuka, now being scouted by Chelsea and Liverpool, plays for Young Boys of Switzerland. The other two, mercurial captain Christopher Katongo (Henan Construction) and forward James Chamanga (Dalian Shide), are based in China.
Zambia's victory is instructive and carries on a tradition set in the previous three editions of the biennial competition, won by teams predominantly made up of home-based players. We recall that in the 2006 edition, six-time champions, the Pharoahs of Egypt, won the tournament with only two foreign-based players. They retained the trophy two years later with only six players based outside the North African country, and at the penultimate tournament held in Angola, Egypt won the trophy for the seventh time using all but four players from the domestic league.
Therein lies a lesson for Nigeria. If Egypt and Zambia could achieve such rare feats with domestic league players, we have no reason not to do the same. Peoples Daily urges the National Sports Commission (NSC) and the Nigerian Football Federation (NFF) to evolve a deliberate policy that emphasizes the use of domestic league players in the Super Eagles.
We applaud the ongoing rebuilding process following the failure of the senior Eagles to qualify for the 2012 Nations Cup and call on the authorities to lend support to the technical crew's resolve to produce a squad with domestic league players as the nucleus. However, this must be on the one condition that the organizers of the local league pay greater attention to the finest details of the league in order to make it an oasis of fresh talents to feed our national teams.
Happily, the Stephen Keshi-led technical crew of the Super Eagles has started off on the right path with an invitation to just 11 foreign-based players to report in camp ahead of next week's Nations Cup qualifier against Rwanda. We urge that in subsequent games and as the present team takes shape even fewer foreign-based players will be called up for national duties.
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