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Malawi's national team narrowly avoided a crisis when forgotten passports were returned just in time for their AFCON qualifier.
Being forgetful can lead to inconvenient consequences but for Malawi’s national football team it almost led to disaster.
The Flames had a near brush with chaos ahead of their 2025 Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) qualifier against Burkina Faso when a key official accidentally left the entire team's passports in a taxi in Bamako, Mali.
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On Monday, the passports of nearly all the players went missing after the official, tasked with handling the team’s travel documents, forgot them in a taxi.
The official had opted for a quick cab ride to buy ice blocks for the team, citing traffic congestion, instead of using the team bus.
To everyone's relief, the documents were safely returned the next day by the very same taxi driver.
Football Association of Malawi (FAM) competitions and communications director Gomezgani Zakazaka shared the bizarre and almost comic sequence of events.
“After establishing that the official had forgotten the passports, the taxi driver thought of returning them today [yesterday] because he felt it was late to return them on Monday,” Zakazaka revealed as per MW Malawi.
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The story takes an even more interesting twist as it emerges that it was not just the passports that were left behind.
Along with the travel documents, an iPad and a whopping $3,000 (approximately Ksh 387,000) in cash were also in the cab. Despite the forgetfulness of the official, the honest taxi driver returned every last item, including the cash, at the team’s training venue the next day.
“Ice blocks! Of all things, he left to buy ice blocks and almost left us without passports,” a source close to the team shared, chuckling about the strange situation.
While it was a moment of lighthearted relief once the documents were safely returned, the incident has raised eyebrows regarding the protocol for such important matters.
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Ben Chiwaya, a well-known football follower, weighed in on the matter, saying;
“Thank God, the driver was a good person, otherwise it would have been a different story. It should give the authorities food for thought.”
He also questioned why the official didn’t use the vehicle allocated to the head of delegation instead of relying on a taxi.
While disaster was narrowly averted, it turns out the missing passports would not have stopped the match from taking place.
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According to the rules governing AFCON qualifiers, teams in such predicaments are allowed to continue even without official travel documents. Zakazaka explained that the Flames would have been permitted to play under Article 39.2 of the competition’s rules.
“If a travelling team loses passports of one or many of its players, the team is authorised to field the concerned player or players provided that each one of them takes photographs with the match commissioner or the referee before the match,” Zakazaka explained, adding that the referee would then send these photos to the Confederation of African Football (CAF) secretariat.
Despite the initial panic,Malawi’s team was never in real danger of missing the match.
Goalkeeper Innocent Nyasulu and striker Chawanangwa Kaonga were the only players who had managed to avoid the debacle, as they arrived late and still had their passports.
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