Otniel Hembapu
I CAN already hear some of my learned folks saying ‘there he goes again, trying to start trouble, living in the past, wanting to blame the previously advantaged people’ or ‘ he simply does not want to accept personal responsibility for his life.’ But that is not where I am heading.
With the National Sports Conference, under the auspices of the Namibia Sports Commission (NSC), starting in earnest yesterday I once again saw it fit to revisit the burning issue of transformation in local sports because it is one of the issues I would like to see being explored at the forum.
I am not going into the black and white blame games of who did this to whom and who didn’t do when. I want to talk about the issue of transformation more in depth, this time tackling it with sharp teeth.
And no, no, I am also not going into statistics of how many black cricketers are in the national cricket team or how many archers, golfers or swimmers of colour Namibia has produced over the past 24 years. Allow me rather to tackle the vague selection criteria used by most coaches in predominately white sports.
Speaking of the indistinguishable selection criteria used in most predominantly white sports, many a time you hear a coach claiming that a particular player of colour is not competent enough to gel into a specific strategy or style of play, which in my case is very understandable as the coach gets to decide who he/she wants or does not want in his/her team.
But it becomes a serious concern to me when that particular selection criteria have for the past 24 years excluded competent athletes of colour, despite them having shown the willingness, potential and ability to excel in those sport codes.
I mean, how do you conclude that a particular athlete is incompetent if you haven’t accorded him the necessary opportunity and access to facilities to gain the required experience and exposure. I am not asking you to field incompetent black players in your respected teams, but the question is how will these athletes of colour ever excel in a team if the playing field is so deliberately unbalanced?
Without wasting time posing more questions than solutions, let me just remind those at the helm of the NSC that this weekend’s conference is the ideal opportunity to ferment ideas and programmes that would finally bring about change in our sports fraternity, starting with the introduction of quotas to ensure continuous development and also improve the level of funding, amongst various pressing issues. Until next time, Eewa!