Mguni fights stigma to rise to the top

BY GRACE CHIRUMANZU
A bad asthma attack during her childhood each time
she tried to run, like the other kids of her age, could have took charge of her life and discouraged her to be the sportsperson she wished to be growing up in
Harare’s high-density suburb of Highfield.
But neither did asthma nor eczema pulled her down
from being the person she wanted to be in life, a self motivated chief executive of the Zimbabwe Olympic Committee (ZOC). Anna Mguni ignored the bad
aspect of her health to focus more on her strengths and this has seen her emerge as the boss of the country’s Olympic Games governing board.
“I was a very sickly child suffering from asthma and
eczema to the extent that doctors said I could not do any normal activities that requires exertion. Watching other kids knowing that if ever I start running my parents will say don’t run, don’t do this, you will cough; was just bad because I really wanted to be like other kids. I spent days in hospital and
even had a near death experience, it was just bad,” she recalls.
The negative comments about her seemingly peeling skin from eczema rather encouraged her to stand for who she was inside. She did not allow people to take away the courage in her.
“I also suffered from eczema and back then I was stigmatised; people would look at me strangely and ask what was wrong with my skin and what is going on? I grew up to be so defensive on whether why I wassick or why my skin had broken out. It really toughened me into realising that
there is a border line, that (sickness) is not really important –there are more important things to life than that,” she said.
Mguni, a single mother of two girls, who was appointed as the ZOC CEO following Stanley Mutoya’s resignation last November may have faced a jittery start to her new career faced with preparations for the high profile London 2012 Olympic Games set for July, but that has not been the case.
The former national basketball team and Real Returners star acknowledges the help of her two predecessors, Mutoya and Robert Mutsauki, who have assisted with a smooth flow of information and advice. She insisted that for women to be successful and take up decision-making positions in Zimbabwe, they need not challenge men but realise that it is their support
they need.
“We are not really challenging them (men) but we need their support for more women to end take up these decision-making posts,” said Mguni.
Being a woman at the helm of one of the country’s sports board, it is tempting for some people to quickly judge her as a potential failure after the Asiagate scandal unearthed by the media proved to have been masterminded by an allegedly corrupt fellow woman, Henrietta Rushwaya.
Mguni refuses to be painted with the same dirty brush.
“I see it as a challenge, we need to assist our men get over this cultural perspective because if it was a man they would not paint every man with the same brush so why do one have to do that because it is a woman?” she questioned.
“It is a difficult system to fight but we need to work through it by education and also by just being clean in our dealings. It is up to us the women in whatever profession we are in we need to be
professional. Otherwise we lose our credibility a lot faster than they (men) do.”
She has a traceable record as a sports administrator and her passion for the field can never be questioned. She captained her basketball and hockey team at High School and the team sport has taught her to work with others and learn from their ideas.
From a tricky childhood to teaching Geography at Vulindlela Secondary school in rural Matabeleland where there was no electricity, shortage of textbooks and having to extract all notes for students, Mguni realised how she was a source of information for her students.
She is proud to have been a teacher saying the experience taught her how to deal with people and groomed her into an innovative strong woman.
For the highs and lows that characterised her life, Mguni has so many lessons to learn from it. The most important lesson being that one “may be bad in some aspect of your life but it is certainly not everything about you that is bad. So, why not focus on the good.”
Her vision goes beyond the 2012 games in London as she hopes to “go further in sports administration and follow in the footsteps of Robert Mutsauki who is now with ANOCA and Tomy Sithole who is now with the IOC.”

Source: The Zimbabwean newspaper.