FAZ president Andrew Kamanga has met with the Kingdom of Morocco Chargé d’Affaires Dr Mohamed Kalakhi and confirmed Zambia will support the FIFA candidacy of Morocco Royal Football Federation president Fouzi Lekjaa for the Arabic/Portuguese/Spanish block.

In return, Morocco is expected to back Kamanga for the Anglophone seat that he is contesting for during FIFA elections.

Kamanga said FAZ’s decision to back Morocco was anchored on the long-standing relationship the two associations enjoyed as evidenced by a Memorandum of Agreement that was signed in 2017.

“We had a visit this morning (Tuesday) from the Charge de Affairs from the embassy of the Kingdom of Morocco, Dr Mohamed Kalakhi who was presenting a request from the embassy of Morocco over CAF elections,” he said.

“Morocco have put up a candidate in the president of the Royal Morocco Football Federation Mr Fouzi Lekjaa who is standing for the FIFA council seat under the group of Arabic, Portuguese/Spanish speaking countries.”

“The charge de affairs from the Morocco embassy asked Zambia to support Mr Lekjaa and we have re-affirmed our support,” he said.

“In the same breath we requested Morocco to support the Andrew Kamanga candidacy for the FIFA seat in the same election.”

Kamanga said the partnership between Zambia and Moroccans made it easy for FAZ to support Lekjaa’s bid.

“In addition, we also reiterated that Zambia and Morocco have an existing partnership and corporation agreement which was signed in 2017. In this regard we requested the Royal Morocco Football Federation to consider three of our senior coaches led by Mr Wedson Nyirenda who would like to complete the CAF Pro licence,” he said.

“We have been assured that this request will be expedited by the Royal Morocco Football Federation so that we can continue to build capacity in our coaches.”

Morocco has a renowned coaching school run by the Morocco Football Federation. 

“This is why in the long term even FAZ has embarked on the creation of a FAZ coaching school. The coaching school will be run with the help of the Croatian Football Federation who are expected to come and set up a coaching school in Zambia. This initiative overrides our earlier intention to send five coaches to Europe for training,” he said.

“By having a school here, we will end up training more coaches of different age groups as coaching is now treated as a professional career. This is one of the milestones in the 10-year strategic plan which will change the fortunes of our game.”

The FIFA seat for the Anglophone block is being contested Walter Nyamilandu (Malawi), Lamin Bajo (Gambia), Nicholas Mwendwa (Tanzania), Wallace Karia (Tanzania) and Amaju Pinnick (Nigeria).

Two slots are available for the Anglophone block.