It’s that day today.

I woke up at 3pm with a resolution to stop all drinking of alcoholic liquids. I went to bed at 4pm last night after a wild drinking bender around Johannesburg in the able company of Japhet Ncube, a drinker of note.

I am due to have a social meeting with Sure Kamhunga, the Econet Wireless spokesman.

The venue of our meeting – the News Café in Rosebank – doesn’t look like a good meeting venue for a guy who just quit the bottle.

Add to that the presence of Dingilizwe Ntuli, another very able and decorated drinker who will almost be certainly taunting me and reminding me just how good beer is as a social partner.

My rehabilitation, I decided, should begin with eating a lot of meaty food. That may come handy should I decide to come out of retirement during the course of the evening, I also thought.

Kamhunga is an easy-going fellow who confesses he has never been to Soweto. He has strong views about everything, but none so passionately expressed as his concerns about the running of football in Zimbabwe.

He is an authority in this area. Just last year, Econet Wireless pulled out from sponsoring the Premier Soccer League after running into difficulties with those running our domestic game.

Kamhunga’s view is that until Zimbabwean football is run as a business, there will be no progress.

Econet has no immediate plans, he said, to sponsor Zimbabwean football again. Zifa boss Wellington Nyatanga, the Econet man told me, had outlived his usefulness and should go.

Listening to Kamhunga, I discover how upsetting it is that despite all the abundant goodwill there is in the business sector, our football administrators don’t inspire any confidence that the sponsors will get their money’s worth.

It’s all very depressing. Rather like the whole national crisis, it’s difficult to tell when progress will be made in the running of our football

It is to expect too much of our national soccer teams to perform wonders in regional competitions when the PSL and Zifa executives are themselves putting no effort to the cause.

In my entire drinking career (very short I must say), the thing that irritates me most is having a guy in your travelling party turning down the offer of a drink in a club.

Kamhunga may not be as prolific a drinker as Ntuli, for instance, but he got stuck in on Red Wine.

Soon enough, I found the lure of a drink too hard to resist. After knocking down two glasses of Fanta (it’s my favourite soft drink), I lost the will to live in retirement. I went back to Peroni, the Italian brew threatening to take the thunder out of Amstel.

It would have been the worst retirement in history, as Hip Hop mogul Jay Z once said! The retirement would have been felt by all the staff at South African Breweries – from the cleaner right through to the managing director’s secretary.

And the grandfather of drinking, the wartime British Prime Minister Winston Churchill who famously said he had “taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken from him”, would surely have turned in his grave.
……………………………………………………..
The retirement complete, Kamhunga departed with a promise that we would link up tomorrow and go to Soweto.

I left with Ntuli shortly after headed for Adam Ndlovu’s Las Palmos nightclub in Bramley.

Many of our readers will remember we featured the club’s opening on this website.

Words like “trendy”, “mature audiences” and “professionals” were freely deployed by Ndlovu to describe his club in the story.

Tired of patronising South African clubs, I have decided to come here to have a feel of home.

Set on top of what appears to be a shopping centre, the club is only visible to those who know it.

It’s 10pm. As we enter, some mid 1990’s kwaito tunes are belting from the speakers. There is no DJ. The DJ box is set to the right of the door with a small dance floor just below.

Adam is not present. The barman, who strikes me as a steady and likeable fellow, tells us that the former Highlanders and national team forward has gone out but will be back shortly.

There are about four people sitting at the bar. A group of about four clumsily-dressed young lads in the company of three tired-looking women and an old man, possibly in his late 60s, are playing pool in the other section of the club.

The boys are talking in English, the type that you find hanging out in the liquor stores around Barham Green in Bulawayo – young, half-educated and probably unemployed.

The seating arrangements don’t seat comfortably with “trendy”. There are standard benches and chairs, the kind that you find at most pubs around South Africa.

The four boys playing pool, all of whom wore sneakers (which Adam told us would not be allowed) clearly don’t look the “mature” and “professional” crowd that we were promised.

Ntuli tells me he was one of the hundreds of Zimbabweans who paid the place a visit after reading about it on New Zimbabwe.com. He had taken a few colleagues from the Sunday Times and driven to the place. He left in a huff, he tells me.

If we had not bought the drinks, we would have left almost immediately.

I challenged Ntuli to a game of pool. We played a 'best of three' and he was comprehensively routed – ‘3-0 to the Arsenal’, I sang at the end!

We left shortly after, disappointed at this most depressing end to the night.

On our way out, Ntuli tells me that the club starts kicking well after 1am “when bar tenders and waiters from other clubs knock off”. Apparently they are Las Palmos’ biggest patrons, just as most waiters around Johannesburg are Zimbabweans (unscientific but true statistic, Ntuli insists).

One of those who have joined the bar tending trade, I learn, is Highlanders legend and former Kaizer Chiefs defender, Cleopas Dlodlo.

It’s upsetting.