- Bafana Bafana's decline can be neatly sown into the government's same plunging over the years.
- The South African Football Association has never adequately addressed developmental footballing issues.
- The national team failed to qualify for the African Cup of Nations for the fifth time since 1992.
If there is a sport that accurately encapsulates South Africa's gradual decline into decadence since 1994, it is football.
That the sport, the most widely played, fastest growing and most popular in the country, finds its national team missing out on the African Cup of Nations for the fifth time since 1992 is a source of pain.
South African football fans, who took time to fall in love with Bafana but eventually did in that heady period between 1994 and 1998, deserve better than this.
Imagine the embarrassment of having a Confederation of African Football president in Patrice Motsepe and his national team not being there to strut their stuff.
That's some way of undoing the hard work of the mid to late 1990s.
It’s worth remembering that SA morphed from being 4x4s (because of their 4-0 defeats to Nigeria and Mexico and 4-1 to Zimbabwe) into a highly competitive fighting force on the continent.
That short turnaround, without the prior taste of international sport that allowed rugby and cricket to adapt better on their returns, was nothing short of amazing.
That they were able to sustain that momentum until the turn of the millennium was also remarkable, but with diminishing continental returns, it was clear that something was wrong.
It's worth remembering that SA have only made the African Cup of Nations quarter-finals thrice in the past 18 years.
That was in Mali in 2002, at home in 2013 and in Egypt in 2019. There were some unspeakable group stage horrors and non-qualifications in between those small peaks.
SA’s Afcon and by extension, their World Cup woes, are well documented, along with the flawed player development pipeline systems.
So is the South African Football Association’s archaic structure that doesn’t allow for people who have the game’s interests at heart to make positive contributions.
That there was a “Vision 2022” that spelled out the plans for the national teams without going into detail was part of the problem.
We’ve seen this with government departments with their plans that have fancy acronyms but little substance.
It's like Bafana Bafana and Safa are a governmental department wearing a football cloak, with all the cleverly worded plans and budgets but nothing on the service delivery field.
SA’s football administrators, like our politicians, have long mastered the art of identifying the problem on the horizon instead of solving the one at the doorstep.
What kind of national sport can thrive without an effective school soccer system that encompasses the length and breadth of the country?
Football has a reach rugby and cricket can only dream of, but Safa’s narrow sightedness, like that of the government, means this potential won’t be unearthed anytime soon.
Watching the men’s national team lurch from one disaster to another works hand-in-hand with how our government has strode into decadence.
So many gains were made in the mid to late 1990s, but with little investment in the building blocks for the future, castles are now being built on sand.
The warnings for the government were there with regards to upgrading the power grid. They went unheeded and now we have load shedding.
Safa knew they had to keep their development patterns up to speed. They didn’t and now we find ourselves with players slipping through the cracks and the national team being routinely embarrassed.
It’s the same WhatsApp group they belong to.
Someone on Twitter said we need to accept the fact that we’re a country that loves football, but who are not good at it.
I think we’ve reached the juncture of swallowing this bitter truth.
Khanyiso Tshwaku is a senior journalist at Sport24.
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