This past week, the Sports Minister Hamson Obua appointed a new National Council of Sports (NCS) Board to steer the sports sector for the next 2 years. At the helm of this board is former Basketball President Ambrose Tashobya who replaced Dr. Donald Rukare as NCS Board Chairman. Dr. Rukare saw some impressive improvements at the NCS that included better time keeping, better documentation, sharing of vital documents and quite importantly separation of the NCS policy makers i.e. the board from the implementers i.e. the Secretariat headed by the General Secretary, Dr. Ogwel Bernard.
Tashobya will have to continue these good deeds and others while also full filling 4 key issues that continue to elude the sports sector and keeping it in a lot of uncertainty, confusion, disgruntlement and consequently under development.
The first and most important issue that Tashobya must handle is the Sports Television matter. If sports is going to convince tax payers, parliament or cabinet to allocate it more funding, then those people must be able to see the games that they are funding. I do not even understand how anyone expects to convince a funder to add them more money when that funder never gets to see what they are paying for. More so when the ongoing Covid pandemic actually dictated that spectators are even not allowed to come and watch our games physically hence confining them to only to the option of TV.
A great development that has come up is that Next Media Services (NMS) has entered into partnerships with several federations to capture their games, produce them and then broadcast them on NBS TV, Sanyuka TV, Afromobile App, etc. This is a very huge cost off the shoulders of the Federations but the Federations must ensure that the content which NMS needs to capture is regularly available.
NCS must come in to fund the content availability for all federations with NMS contracts and this can be done in exchange for some financial rewards to NCS from the existing TV partnerships. Tashobya should turn this into an added income source for NCS.
The second issue is that NCS has a fully-fledged Marketing department also called the Business and Investment Unit (BIU). This unit is involved in marketing NCS infrastructure instead of sports federations which is a very huge mistake. They are mainly concerned with finding market for utilizers of the Cricket Oval, Hockey Pitch, MTN Arena, etc. This explains why NCS does not have even one sponsor for Sports. With the serious shortage of finances badly needed by Uganda’s sports Federations, the NCS BIU cannot be marketing infrastructure instead of the actual games and athletes themselves.
The third key area is the enactment of the Sports Funding Guidelines. This is something that has been on the table for the last over 4 years but never moving an inch. The best we have heard is that NCS enacted Temporary funding guidelines but we have no idea how this was done, the parameters used and neither do we know what exactly those guidelines state. Again they were done secretly and in total avoidance of a round table agreeable process with all Federations.
Absence of these funding guidelines is creating a lot of problems in the sports sector ranging from destruction of athletes’ and coaches’ careers to fights in some Federations either due to lack of funding or due to advancement of large amounts of money not governed by any known statute in the country. Tashobya needs to know that several attempts to have those guidelines completed have been curtailed by selfish interests that are more manifest than some may think.
The last issue that Tashobya needs to think about very critically is the justification for increment in the sports budget allocation. For many years the justification has been Uganda’s good performance at international events as seen from medals won. The problem here is that nearly all those medals are emanating from only 1 Sports Federation out of the 51 federations in total that NCS recognizes. That federation is Athletics (Running).
Some people have kept their faith in this reason of medals but honestly by the time President Museveni welcomes the Tokyo 2020 Olympic Medalists by stating publicly that those medals were from athletes that are naturally gifted by God due to their high altitude home area that gives them better lungs than others, then you just know that the reason of medals does not make much sense to the people who allocate funding in this country and it is time to rely on other justifications. Realistically you cannot equate the success of just 1 federation out of 51 to the entire sports sector.
There is a critical need to front other reasons now such as creating more employment opportunities for Ugandans, elimination of dangerous youth idleness, having a more productive and healthy population, etc. These reasons rhyme better with our leaders and fellow citizens because they understand their immediate impact. Few people understand or are willing to wait for the long term impact of an international medal but many will understand immediately that if you give 1 billion Ugx to a Federation, then that federation will create jobs for Ugandans and also help keep idle youths off the streets.
I wish Tashobya and his team a successful term of office 2022 – 2024. As a parting summary Tashobya must rally his team to digest the following observations:
*1.* You cannot expect any funder including tax payers to give you money when they cannot see what exactly they are funding. This means Sports TV is of critical importance.
*2.* You cannot keep complaining that you do not have enough development financing and yet you have a fully-fledged marketing department that is marketing infrastructure instead of the actual sports itself.
*3.* The continued unfair distribution of sports funds due to lack of the funding guidelines has crippled most federations and jeopardized the development of their athletes and coaches. There is great evil in the derailment of the sports careers of our athletes in the poorly funded federations.
*4.* You cannot keep using the same reasons of medals to attain better sports funding when clearly such reasons are not working. It is time to add the more immediately visible benefits to the country in our reasoning for better funding.
The Writer is Jjagwe Robert, the Secretary General of the Union of Uganda Sports Federations and Associations (UUSFA) and President of the Uganda Table Tennis Association (UTTA).