EDITORIAL COMMENT: We’ve proved many  doubters wrong

ON Thursday, Royal Harare Golf Club opened its doors to scores of professional golfers from around the world on the first day of the 2018 Zimbabwe Open tournament which runs until tomorrow when the overall winner is crowned.

It’s the biggest convergence of foreign and local golfers ever seen in the history of this country and comes at a time when the value of the Zimbabwe Open, the country’s premier golf tournament, has been increased to R2 million.

This makes the Zimbabwe Open one of the richest tournaments on the Sunshine Tour head-quartered in South Africa, but which runs a number of top tournaments across southern Africa and has partnerships with the European Tour.

Old Mutual are the title sponsors of the Zimbabwe Open this year, but a number of other companies are also on board playing their part to ensure that we stage a tournament that showcases the best possible competition, which can be fought in this country, when it comes to golf.

That these companies have even managed to increase the purse of the Zimbabwe Open to the R2 million mark shows that something good is happening in the country in terms of an economy that is starting to turn for the better after years of poor performance as the toxicity of politics took centre stage.

Companies can only allocate funds to sport when they have more than enough to sustain their operations and also declare a dividend to their shareholders and the mere fact that we have a number of local firms coming together to pour in R2 million into the Zimbabwe Open is a big indicator of the significant change for the better happening in the corridors of our companies.

When the local economy was on its knees, being devoured by hyperinflationary forces, the Zimbabwe Open was the first of our major sporting events to disappear from the radar, and it only returned when things started to brighten up.

Now we are seeing significant changes in this tournament with such huge financial injections into its coffers which proves that those prophets of doom who have been preaching that things aren’t getting better in this country are not only wrong, but are being left to sink in their world of denial.

We understand why they will pretend not to see what we are all seeing — their politically-driven agenda doesn’t allow them to see the light given that it’s something that has always thrived in the darkness, and they will try as best as they can to avoid the obvious, to avoid facing the reality.

In their world, they would rather have preferred a situation where the Zimbabwe Open is scrapped this year, with the companies that have always stood by it saying they don’t have the financial resources to bankroll it because times are hard.

That would have provided them with the ammunition they need to go on Twitter or Facebook to spread their gospel of doom and gloom and tell their foreign handlers that, indeed, things are breaking down in this country and only a change of political leadership can rescue the situation.

When we hosted nine other countries from as far afield as Papua New Guinea in the East to the men from the West Indies in the Caribbean for the ICC Cricket World Cup Qualifier, the same prophets of doom were praying, day and night, that something goes terribly wrong and we fail to execute our mandate.

After all, they argued, in the countdown to the tournament, that we didn’t have the capacity to host such a major international tournament because we had a cash crisis and a number of other challenges which they fed their paymasters.

However, they watched from a distance as we staged a very successful tournament, with virtually no complaint from all the visiting teams, who felt very much at home and revelled in our sunshine and the wildlife that we have in abundance.

Even the Scotsmen and the Irish, teams which in the past would have triggered a lot of political debate in Britain for choosing to come and tour here, came for the ICC Cricket World Cup Qualifier and had a very good time in this country as we have been reading from their messages.

Clearly, something big is happening in this country in terms of its movement forward after years of being trapped at the same position, and like what President Mnangagwa always says, it’s very clear that we are a nation that is open for business.

No sporting discipline in this world is closely associated with the rich and famous like golf, where the corporate leaders usually discuss and seal big deals over a round of nine or 18 holes, and when the Zimbabwe Open, as is the case with our premier tournament, is in good shape, it sends a lot of positive signals about the status of the economy and the country.

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