Almost two decades after Zambia lost its entire national football team in a plane crash, the country’s top sport has taken a different twist and there are no smiles on the faces of families left by the departed.

Upcoming Zambian striker Freeman Chabala is a man with a quandary. Freeman, whose father Efford died in a plane crash that killed the Zambian team in 1993, is propelled by a burning desire to continue with the legacy left by his dad. But at home, Freeman’s mother, Joyce, loves her son and hates football in equal measure; she does not want to hear the word ‘football’ mentioned anywhere – it rekindles bitter memories of her late husband – not to mention what has become of most of the deceased players’ families.

Freeman was seven when his father died with his 30 teammates, officials and crew off the coast of Gabon. Freeman has now grown older and wiser. He searches for answers for his father’s death as well as for personal healing from the pain of losing a parent at an early age. “Obviously life has been more difficult than it was supposed to be,” said Freeman, a biomedicine graduate. He is surprisingly one of the few success stories from the players’ children, some of whom have turned to the streets for survival after dropping out of school with no one to provide for them. “Our family had to learn to adjust because of having lost a breadwinner, and it really changed our lives,” he said. 
Freeman is lucky that he knew his father for a few years at least. Joyce was four months pregnant at the time of the crash. Five months later in September, she gave birth to twins who would never know their father. “I only know my dad through pictures and stories my mum has told me. I have always been told that he was a very good goalkeeper,” said David, one of the twins.

Perhaps Joyce has extended such storytelling to a few lashes on David’s buttocks after finding him playing football: the sport is not his cup of tea. While Freeman vividly remembers his father, he has also joined the surviving widows and older relatives in searching for answers from the yet-to-be-declassified report into the crash.
“Because of what we have gone through, things like the full report will forever haunt me. Everything happened when I was very young and now that I am older I want to know,” he said. “A lot of things are difficult to understand. I don’t know why they [the government] haven’t given us the report after all this time. It looks like we will continue getting the same endless stories…. It will probably take another 456 years to get the full report that should have taken less than 16 years.”

The plane crash that upset a nation
On 27 April 1993, a military plane carrying the entire Zambian football team crashed in the Atlantic Ocean as it flew to Senegal for a ’94 USA World Cup qualifier. The short-haul plane had just made a refuelling stop in Gabon and, a few minutes after take-off, it blew up in flames, killing all 30 people on board.

Prior to departure from Zambia, the plane had been delayed for several hours in Lusaka as engineers checked a faulty engine. In fact, the team had just returned from Mauritius where they registered an impressive 3-0 victory in the qualifying series and, upon arrival in Zambia, several players are known to have expressed reservations about the safety of the plane.

Flight no. AF 309 of the Zambia Air Force departed from the City Airport in Lusaka approximately seven hours late. They were flying in a Buffalo DHC-5D short-haul transport because the cash-strapped Football Association of Zambia (FAZ) could not afford to fly the team commercially or charter a plane. A commercial flight could do the journey in a single hop, but the Buffalo, being a short-haul transport, needed three refuelling stops.

It was not the first time the team had had to use an air force plane to cut costs. “They had become accustomed to making sacrifices in the quest to bring glory to the nation,” Ponga Liwewe, a renowned football journalist, once wrote in a Zambian magazine. “On many occasions they had played for a pittance while their opponents walked away with thousands of dollars, but their motivation was always high. To play for the country was a privilege and flying the Zambian flag was incentive enough. Four years earlier they failed to qualify for the 1990 World Cup in Italy despite boasting a formidable side, the majority of whom had played in the 4-0 thrashing of Italy at the Olympics, but this time they were determined to go all the way.” Unfortunately, fate blew their chances away in 1993.

And the Zambian fans that remained to witness post-crash life have seen the opening of a sad chapter in the country’s football. An incomplete report into the crash was only released ten years after the accident and no one seems to care when a full one will be made public. However, according to the incomplete report, a mechanical fault in the left engine of the plane caused the crash. Pilots switched off the still-functioning right engine by mistake because of a “poor indicator light bulb”, causing the plane to lose all power and crash. Among other factors, the report cites the pilots’ fatigue as another possible reason for the accident.

The football gene retained by anger
Almost two decades after the crash, Freeman, who is the third-born in a family of six, has discovered he has a football gene in him. He is the only one so far of the children left by the deceased players who wants to continue with his father’s career.
 Freeman plays the game for top league club Lusaka Dynamos in Lusaka.

However, Freeman, who can play both in attack and midfield, has little time to play now that he has a full-time job and is struggling to find a balance between the pitch and the laboratory – something he did while still at university.

Yet his mother admits she is against any of her children playing football as a full-time career because memories of her husband’s death are still very fresh in her heart. You can understand her point of view. “It still feels like yesterday,” Joyce said. Her anger, like that of many others, is written in every line of her face and every nuance of her voice.

At the time I visited the family in Mufulira town, north of Zambia, Joyce ushered me into her living room before I started recording Freeman’s account in my notebook. 
The walls of her house are covered with pictures and other souvenirs Efford picked up on his tour of duty. Only a wall separates the living room from the kitchen where she stood at the stove preparing food whilst I spoke with Freeman. But, while her sense of smell was with her in the kitchen, it was clear that her ears were listening to everything I discussed with Freeman. “That is why the current Zambian national team continues to lose, because the spirits of our relatives are not happy,” she chipped in at one point.

Joyce’s anger is always close to the surface, and she feels bureaucrats have hijacked the memorial services. She accused some people who previously organized memorial services of using the families as tools while ignoring pleas for full answers.

“It looks like we are not part of their programmes. We are tired of their speeches,” Joyce said. “We never get any logistical help from the stakeholders to attend the commemorations every year.”

Joyce said there was no help from the memorial-organizing committees on that day. “They don’t seem to care how we move and where the victims’ families sleep when we travel to Lusaka for the memorial ceremony every year. She continued: “It is like a mockery. A lot of widows have died and children are out of school. There are a lot of people who are suffering. I don’t watch football. I have lost interest because nothing has come out of football except pain. As a result, I don’t encourage my children to play football. To them, they would like to play football and continue where their father left off. But I am very much against them playing football.”

Besides losing her husband, another thing that pains Joyce is that assurances that the government made after the crash have not been fulfilled. Children of the deceased players were promised free education until they reached university. That has not come to pass. Most of them are actually treated like outcasts. Soon after the crash, the memorial services that followed were attended by thousands of people, but now only dozens make their annual pilgrimage to the burial site that remains incomplete and fenced off from the public. Further, after the first memorial service, the government withdrew its support and organizing such events today has become the responsibility of the families of of well-wishers. There have been suggestions from the state that it was high time people stopped mourning during memorial services and that they should turn them into “celebratory” events in honour of the team. It has even become normal for the government not to send representatives to such occasions.

Compensated in Zambia but international silence
On the international front, Joyce also has no kind words for the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and the sport’s world governing body, FIFA. Joyce is upset because CAF president Issa Hayatou has never been to Zambia to mourn with the families or even considered compensating them.

Contrast the Zambian case to the family of the late Cameroonian international Marc Vivien Foe who died on 26 June 2003 in the French city of Lyon after collapsing in the semi-final of the Confederations Cup against Colombia. FIFA allocated $750,000 from its humanitarian fund to help educate Foe’s children. Following a meeting of the CAF executive committee in December 2003, the body decided to dedicate the 2004 African Super Cup to the former Indomitable Lion while the organization has also posthumously honoured him with their highest award – the gold Order of Merit.

On 11 November 2003, a charity match was played in the midfielder’s honour in Lyon and all funds generated by the match were donated to a charitable fund chaired by Foe’s wife Marie-Louise as well as to the completion of a sports complex he was building. The CAF further decided to allocate $100,000 to Foe’s family and his funeral was attended by Hayatou and FIFA president Sepp Blatter.

Alas, Zambian families have never received such generosity from either Blatter or Hayatou. “Look at how much has been done for Foe. Such segregatory tendencies by CAF must come to an end,” Joyce said. Ghanaian legend Abedi ‘Pele’ Ayew agreed that injustice has been done to the Zambian families, but remains optimistic that a solution can still be found. “That’s why we are in the CAF and all these things concern us,” said Pele, a member of a CAF standing committee.

On the Zambian scene, it appears the government was ready to continue with lies like the ones told during the funeral, as long as the families did not take any action. The families had to sue before they were compensated for their relatives’ demise. And nine years after suing the government, families won compensation to the tune of US$ 4 million in the courts. However, the money typically ended benefitting greedy family administrators, rather than the helpless children.

Sadly, from a legal perspective, after winning compensation, there seems no other way the families can seek redress for any further money. “The only mandate they gave us was to sue for compensation, which we successfully did,” explained Sakwiba Sikota, one of the families’ lawyers. “They can again sue the government to compel them to release the report, but that won’t lead to any monetary gain. In terms of compensation, I think justice was done, but when it comes to the report being released, I feel the families haven’t received fair treatment.”

Life has also gone on with hardship and pain for most of the families’ victims, without satisfactory compensation or the emotional relief of knowing the full contents of the report.
 Some family members have moved on with their lives while death has claimed others – at the time of writing only seven widows were still alive. Moving on for both first- and second-generation family members has seen contrasting fortunes.

In the case of Joyce, for instance, after the crash, life was so hard that she had to work as a ticket seller at her husband’s former club, Mufulira Wanderers. She was often not paid for long periods and started running a hair salon to feed her family. At one point, when her daughter was accepted into college, it took a cameraman from Europe, who had come to cover the crash, to raise the money for her fees.

Joyce is not the only who has become accustomed to such a life. Peggy Nyirenda Mwape is the widow of the late FAZ president Michael Mwape, who was also a crash victim on that fateful April day. She mourned a husband and later a daughter but has since moved on, retreating from the big city life of Lusaka to a 52-hectare farm in the rural part of Zambia’s Copperbelt mining region.

She sold the urban property she and her late husband had acquired to send her two youngest children to school and retreated to the family farm. “Losing a husband is not the end of the world but the beginning of another chapter in a woman’s life,” she said.

Peggy, meanwhile, refuses to talk about anything to do with football and continues to mourn her husband in her own way. “There is no place for football in my heart because there are so many things that have gone wrong that I would like to talk about but I would rather leave it to others to talk about that,” she said.

The magical team
One man who knew the ins and outs of the team that died is retired 74-year-old veteran Zambian broadcaster Dennis Liwewe. Liwewe started his career on the vast Copperbelt province where the majority of the players were born. In fact, just as this northern region is considered to be the economic hub of Zambia, it is also the birthplace of the country’s top sports stars. The area has produced some of Zambia’s sporting legends such as former 400m hurdles world champion Samuel Matete and ex-Commonwealth light heavyweight boxing champion Lottie Mwale, while in football, the Copperbelt produced the celebrated 1988 African Footballer of the Year Kalusha Bwalya.

Liwewe saw most of the deceased players discard their umbilical cords as he worked for the mines until the time they honed their skills using handmade plastic balls locally known as cimpombwa. He was to travel 96 times to 42 countries around the world in his 41-year career, broadcasting from different stadiums to millions of people who enjoyed his distinctive voice on the airwaves. In search of the elusive victory with the players who were to die, Liwewe literally travelled from the Asia-Pacific rim in the east to the shores of the Atlantic Ocean in the west.

On the African continent, he was with the team from the Atlas Mountains and the pyramids of Egypt in the north to the Drakensberg mountains in the south, not to mention many places scattered in between. He comprehended the players’ determination to win. Little wonder that after the crash he could not come to terms with the dark period that engulfed Zambia. He had to spend several weeks under the microscopic eyes of doctors in the Intensive Care Unit of the University Teaching Hospital, the country’s biggest referral centre. To date, each morning Liwewe hears a cock’s crow, he kneels to thank God: he would have been killed in the crash had he not missed the fateful flight! From 1993 until he completely switched off his microphone, on his doctor’s advice, his voice became a rare commodity on radio.

Regardless of what became of him after the crash, the former British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) correspondent does not shy away from discussing when Zambia created a new football team. He said the new team needed to keep the memory of their former teammates alive. Liwewe recounted: “What is interesting is that immediately after the crash, we picked up players literally from the streets, or what you might call spare parts, and built up an incredible team from nowhere. We pampered the new team and pumped into it the necessity to fight for Mother Zambia despite the disaster. We told them that the spirits of their brothers that are buried outside Independence Stadium would not rest until they showed beyond any shadow of a doubt that they could do it.”

The spirits that Liwewe refers to must be turning in their graves if they have been following events in Zambia’s football from the time they died. The grandstand of Independence Stadium, the traditional slaughterhouse of visiting teams, was razed to the ground after the government embarked on an ambitious exercise to renovate the arena. Ironically, the stadium, which is now deserted, was built as a temporary structure for the sole purpose of celebrating Zambia’s political independence from British colonial rule in 1964 but was later adopted as the country’s national stadium. Over the years, the structure became unstable and even claimed nine lives during an international match in 1997.

Following growing concern about the unsuitability of the stadium, the government moved in to renovate it, forcing Zambia to host its home matches in Chililabombwe, a town that borders the Democratic Republic of Congo. The choice of Konkola Stadium in Chililabombwe could be seen as choosing between a rock and a hard place: the arena was also later to claim lives of 12 fans during an Africa Cup qualifier in 2007. The poor state of Konkola Stadium has not escaped the attention of FIFA, who warned Zambia to bring it up to acceptable international standards or risk it being banned. Had FIFA banned the country from using the arena, Zambia would have been forced to play its home matches in a neighbouring country like Zimbabwe.

Back in 1994, a year after the crash, the government mobilized a team of local coaches to tour the country in search of new talent that would continue with the ’94 Africa Cup and World Cup campaigns. The new team was sent to Denmark for an intensive training camp and the hard work invested by everyone who was attached to the squad paid dividends. With late Scot Ian Porterfield barking instructions from the coaching bench, Zambia lost 2-1 to Nigeria in the final of the 1994 African Cup of Nations in Tunisia.

That same year remains the closest the Chipolopolo ever came to qualifying for a World Cup final as they only needed a draw to book a passage to the USA finals. A 1-0 away loss to Morocco shattered their dreams. “I am not really surprised that we achieved so much during that period because everything we did as a country was driven by emotions and everyone rallied behind the team in whatever way they could,” observed Simataa Simataa, who was then FAZ president and the team delegation leader in Tunisia. “In the process, we neglected so many aspects of the game, like grassroots football. For Zambia to bounce back, we need to address a lot of things and youth football is very important.”

Maybe Simataa has a point. From reaching the Africa Cup finals in 1994, a year after the crash, and a semi-final berth achieved in 1996, Zambia has gone out in the first round of five of the last six (1998–2008) Africa Cup of Nations finals, including failure to qualify for the biennial tournament in 2004. Regionally, the Chipolopolo have won the Cosafa Cup three times and the Cecafa Cup once, yet it appears that the football rise of countries like Malawi, Angola, Mozambique and others is fast threatening Zambia’s regional dominance. “What is needed now is a new way of thinking and a new start from the players who are keen on rebuilding our past glory,” Liwewe counseled.

A closer analysis of Zambia’s football strides cannot divorce the role played by the mines in the development of the sport. Mining companies sponsored football as part of their Corporate Social Responsibility and clubs under their wings received unlimited financial and technical support. But the privatization of the mining conglomerate, the Zambia Consolidated Copper Mines, in 1992, in an effort to revive an ailing economy, has seen most mine owners abandon or significantly reduce their support of football.
While many people in Zambia argue that the privatization of the mines is largely responsible for the country’s free fall down the football ladder, it is also worth noting that the team’s demise in 1993 left the new generation of players without any mentorship. A gap was created by the sudden loss of the cream of role models and new players had no one to hand them the baton.

Kalusha Bwalya maintains the legend
One of the many things for which retired Zambia’s football icon Kalusha Bwalya will forever be remembered is his belief that the country was capable of rising from the ashes after the crash. Bwalya, who at the time of the accident was playing for PSV Eindhoven in Holland, was scheduled to fly directly to Senegal for the match. Club duty saved him from flying with the rest of the squad from Lusaka.

He had played for many years alongside most of the players who died. Despite losing some of his best friends, Bwalya continued with his magic and irresistible feats of skill on the pitch for years to come. Maybe the burden left for him by his peers has proven to be too heavy to carry as Zambia – in spite of his trying out as their coach and now as FAZ president – seems far from qualifying for the mundial. No wonder that on the 10th anniversary of the crash, he wrote the following emotional tribute for the BBC:
Not a day goes by without us thinking of our lost friends. It is hard to believe that 10 years have passed since that tragic night when the unthinkable happened to Zambia in those dark Gabonese skies over the Atlantic Ocean. Lost in an instant’s moment before midnight on 27 April 1993, was a cream of a nation long regarded among Africa’s footballing elite.

Death cruelly robbed Zambia of talent, both established and emerging, as well as its brightest coaching and administrative minds. They were and still are heroes to a nation – fathers, brothers and to us friends and comrades. We were on a roll as a team when fate decreed otherwise.

What we the survivors were left with instead, were the agonizing and never-ending notions of what may have been. How would Zambia have fared if tragedy had not struck? Where would Zambian football be today if Efford Chabala, Eston Mulenga, Derby Makinka, Wisdom Chansa, Kelvin Mutale had lived?

Chances are that we would have reached the 1994 World Cup finals in the United States from our qualifying group which comprised Senegal and Morocco. Zambia’s rebuilt squad beat both sides in Lusaka, drew away to Senegal and lost by one goal in a close and decisive match with Morocco in Casablanca. I would like to imagine and I am confident that the outcome in Morocco would have been different with the old team. I would also like to imagine that the team would have shocked a few people in the World Cup finals.

At any rate, it was in homage to our fallen heroes that the rebuilt squad battled its way to the 1994 African Nations Cup final in Tunisia. Again luck was not with us as Zambia lost 2-1 to Nigeria in the final in a memorable game. What would have been? Ten years later one wishes we could turn back the clock. Zambian football will never be the same again. The crash was a huge setback that continues to be felt today.

Though my own playing career is over, my football existence continues to be defined by the events of 27 April 1993. It was a horrible event whose shock still reverberates in Zambia, and I am sure in many parts of the soccer world.

It remains to be seen whether the vacuum left by Zambia’s Dream Team will ever be filled. Perhaps the first time the country will qualify for the World Cup finals is by hosting the tournament or when the spirits of the dead players stop frowning.

This article was featured in the book Africa United. Publication rights to this feature are available from Africa Media Online.