Chingoka limited to 5-day UK Visa

By Tichaona Sibanda
21 June 2007

Peter Chingoka, the chairman of Zimbabwe Cricket has only been granted a 5-day visa to attend the International Cricket Council executive meeting scheduled for next week in London, Newsreel learned on Thursday.

Usually the world travelled Chingoka would get a six month visa on any visit to the UK but it seems all that has changed as the British government tightens its screws on anyone with close links to the regime. The announcement of his visit has irked many Zimbabwean exiles in the UK who are already planning protests during his stay. Free-Zim Youth co-ordinator Alois Mbawara said they have already started mobilising their members to visit the Lords cricket ground next week ‘tell Chingoka in his face that they have destroyed cricket’.

‘This is an opportunity given to us to express our disgust at the way they have killed cricket and destroyed the livelihoods of a number our promising players,’ Mbawara said.

According to Cricinfo, the British Embassy in Harare had recommended to its government that Chingoka be refused admission to the UK on account of his associations with the government of Robert Mugabe. The ban was however blocked by Richard Caborn, the sports minister, who feared that such move could jeopardise the bid to have David Morgan, the England Cricket Board chairman elected as ICC president in 2008.

‘The Foreign Office compromised and have only given Chingoka a visa for five days. He cannot start his journey until Monday, June 25 and must be out of the country by Saturday, June 30. This will enable him to attend the directors’ meeting on Wednesday and Thursday, and the ICC annual meeting which follows, but that’s all,’ Cricinfo said.

A spokesman for the Department of Culture, Media and Sport said that they ‘did not comment on individual visa cases’. Kate Hoey, Caborn’s predecessor as sports minister and the chairperson of the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Zimbabwe, said she was ‘disappointed’ with Caborn’s intervention. She added; ‘Zimbabwe’s cricket officials are at the heart of the dictatorship’s web of corruption and political oppression. It is sad that the sports ministry has used Morgan’s chances, which are really no chance at all, of becoming ICC president to ask the FCO to go against their better judgment and grant a visa. This sort of unprincipled manoeuvring looks very bad when we are asking other countries to stand firm in isolating those at the heart of Mugabe’s regime’.