Gaba Malawi's Samuel Et'o? Nah, call him dull and a cheat..

The news that is in town is about Gabadinho Mhango. At the moment it seems like Gaba is the only player who is enjoying massive publicity in the media. If he is not cheating on his age then he is having problems to score during his JCE exams. Without roving up and down with the truth, Gaba is so dull and is a cheat, atleats my conclusion is based on facts.

Now there is a heated debate as to why this JCE issue is becoming a hot topic, the reason is simple when Gaba was writing his JCE it was news all over. His timetable was splashed in the papers and it generated a lot of excitement because a lot of people including his family, Big Bullets club, FAM and all of us had commented that the boy needed to take his books seriously before his football career.

I remember very well there were a lot of foreign teams that had shown interest to sign the player but the deals never went through. The reasons given were “Gaba apange kaye school”. 

Gaba had on so many occasions snubbed the national team call up because we were made to believe that “he was concentrating on his studies”. For example this other day he didn’t report for camp because he was writing his midterm exams and Coach Kinnah Phiri wasn’t amused at all. In other words as a country we were all waiting to hear what might come from Chichiri Secondary School. We remembered how Gaba came to watch his team draw against Namibia on June 5 at Kamuzu Stadium. He had just finished writing one of his JCE papers.

After noticing lack of fire power upfront during the game, there were calls for the coach to recall Gab for the Kenya game which was scheduled for the other week. The game was coming a day after the boy was sitting for his last paper. It was also reported that the coach had arranged special training sessions for Gaba only. As you can see, we all wished Gaba well but the boy doesn’t have the mind for education.

I have seen people commenting that education and football don’t go together. There are examples of players such as Samuel Eto who are millionaires but never made it in class. Trust me the Samuel Eto example cannot be applied to the Malawian context where our players as good as Josephy Kamwendo can only attract clubs from Mozambique pompa pokwelera kabazapa. They go to South Africa only to be dumped in the Mvela League, if they are lucky they will be signed by a PSL side but chances are that after 1 or 2 seasons they will be relegated to the bench before being offloaded completely. We have so many examples I don’t need to list them here.

Look here; we have seen Players that we all thought had travelled a lot to at least have something to show for it but where are they? Remember the story of Chancy Gondwe? The guy after all the years of playing in South Africa he couldn’t even afford 30 thousand kwacha to enrol at a Theological college in Lilongwe. Should I tell the story of Grant Lungu here? Had it been that he had the papers I believe he could have hanged up his boots and start searching for a job elsewhere. We have Phillip Madinga who is heading FDH bank, do you remember him? He was playing football but he never hesitated to take his books seriously. Apart from the likes of Phillip Madinga, Water Nyamilandu there are few players that have decent jobs after hanging their boots. Why? They don’t have the papers. Football in Malawi doesn’t pay and the standards have gone down that we can’t even produce a Samuel Eto from here, never, not in this generation.

Let me take you to Liberia, I guess we all can remember how George Weah failed to make it as president despite being popular because he did not have the papers. This forced him to go back to school for him to realise his ambition of becoming Liberia’s next president.

If we commend our players for dodging books in favour of football what kind of message are we giving to some young players who are at Primary School and are eyeing to become another Gaba? 

Having said all this let me point out that as a nation we realy need to take the blame also for spoiling this boy. We made him become the Eto we are talking about when he was miles away.