CRASH OF THE BUFFALO – A MUST READ

A new book claims to solve a 30-year-old mystery on why no official report on the military air crash that wiped out Zambia’s national football team in 1993 has never been released.

“Crash of the Buffalo,” by Jay Mwamba, a New York-based writer and former Zambia Daily Mail sports reporter, says the reason is simple. No report was ever written or exists.

“I did not see any report regarding the Gabon Disaster,” he quotes former Zambian President and football fanatic Rupiah Banda telling him in 2018. Banda died in March 2022.

The book also quotes Kaweche Kaunda, a son of Zambia’s first President, Kenneth Kaunda, concurring with the nonexistence of an official report. Kaweche notes how successive Zambian governments over the past three decades have not released the report.

“How many presidents have there been? This report should have been done when President Chiluba was there. Nothing was heard of it. President Mwanawasa came, nothing was heard of it. President Rupiah Banda came, nothing was heard of it – if anybody was going to release it would have been him. Then, President Rupiah Banda left, then came President Sata, nothing came of it. Then President Lungu, and now we have President Hichilema and no one talks about it.”

The only official report of the crash, that occurred shortly after take-off in Libreville, late on the night of April 27, 1993, as a Zambia Air Force Buffalo was ferrying the national team to Senegal for a World Cup qualifier, was issued by the Gabonese authorities in 2003. It faulted the senior pilot on board, Colonel Fenton Mhone, reportedly fatigued after flying the team to Mauritius and back days earlier, for dooming the Buffalo. The Gabonese claimed Mhone, in a panic, switched off the plane’s only source of thrust – the right engine – once the left engine had exploded.

But according to the book, Mhone was not in the cockpit when the Buffalo plunged into the Atlantic. This is based on the condition of the bodies recovered, with the remains of the pilots almost intact.

In other takeaways from ‘Crash of the Buffalo,” the book notes that four months before it crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, the Canadian-built DHC-5D Buffalo military transport had been parked in the sun at the ZAF base in Lusaka with “AOG” or Aircraft on Ground status. That’s aviation parlance for an aircraft with a serious technical fault.

Also, without the Gabon crash, Jamaica’s national team might not have had world football’s most iconic nickname, the “Reggae Boyz” The moniker was coined by a young Zambian player on the southern Africans’ first and only tour of the Caribbean nation in August 1995 – as Zambia continued its recovery under Danish coach Roald Poulsen.