FAZ General Secretary Rueben Kamanga says he enjoys a good relationship with his predecessor Kalusha Bwalya.

FAZ president Andrew Kamanga, his vice Justin Mumba, Rueben, and the Great Kalu were seen posing for pictures after they met at the CAF General Assembly last week in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.

The FAZ General Secretary said Football House delegates had a good interaction with the former FAZ boss when they met in Addis Ababa.

“We are good friends, for the record we are good friends and we had a good interaction but the public had different opinions, making volumes of posts about the particular picture which circulated,” he said.

Speaking when he featured on Let The People Talk program on Radio Phoenix, Kamanga said FAZ was willing to receive partners who may not be in good books with the association.

“As an association we are open to receiving all the partners of the game and in the past months we have shown great commitment. We had an initiative that was driven by the Ministry of Sports where we brought in partners and so we are on to review some of the things that could have happened in the past. We have Damiano Mutale who was indefinitely banned, he is back in football, we had Elijah Chileshe who was also banned indefinitely and we had his ban lifted by the appropriate bodies of FAZ, they revisited the ban and the two are back in football so we are getting somewhere as a football family and all we can do is to appeal to the bigger family to come on board, let’s embrace hands,” he said.

He noted the need for stakeholders to harmonise and support the national team which is on the verge of qualifying for the 2025 Morocco, Africa Cup of Nations.

He said there was no closed door policy at FAZ and everyone was free to come on board.

“Let them come on board but they need to respect the hierarchy, we have to respect the president and his executive in the discharging of their mandate,” he said.

He said it was disappointing that some Zambians prayed for the national team to lose every time there was a game.

“It actually surprises me that when the national team is playing, there are actually others who wish the result can go in the opposite direction which is strange that there are people who think like that and some of them are even listening to us. What kind of Zambians are we? We should be wishing the team to lose? The hate in some people is so deep rooted,” said Kamanga.

“We should be proud as Zambians. We turned 60 years a few days ago we should push in one direction and let’s embrace each other. When the team is playing, we see some funny things of people throwing bottles and other missiles on the pitch which is very unfortunate. You can’t do that to your own game. Some of those things I don’t even know why people travel to go and make sure that those things happen. It is totally unfortunate and my appeal to Zambians as the national team plays Ivory Coast on November 15th at 18:00 hours in Ndola, let’s turn up in large numbers and support the Chipolopolo. If they win that game, they qualify for the AFCON and so we can send them in style. All those with small differences, we can put them aside this time and support the team”.