31 Mar 2015

Botswana National Sport sCouncil (BNSC) chairman, Solly Reikeletseng says All Africa Junior Squash Championship came at the time when his organisation is moving from becoming a council into becoming a commission.

Speaking at the opening ceremony, Reikeletseng said as of April 1, Botswana National Sports Council will be called Botswana National Sports Commission. He said being a commission meant they will be putting consorted effort and working as one since everybody would be under one roof.

“We are not going to be fragmented, we are going to have all our resources put together to ensure that we deliver this package of sport,” he said.

He said he was happy because Botswana was given the opportunity to host the championship, adding it had become part of Botswana’s Deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA).

According to Reikeletseng, in the 1980s, the country had a tag of the whipping boys of Africa, “because everybody was beating us then. We worked so hard and put systems and strategies in place; went abroad to listen as well as learn and came up with a winning strategy,” he said.

He said their strategies paid dividends because, currently Botswana’s Allister Walker was ranked in the top 10 in the world in squash, and that alone was a clear manifestation that "we are doing something right as a country".

Furthermore, he said two of athletes in Athletics Amantle Montsho and Nijel Amos were ranked number one in the world in middle distance and Isaac Makwala, about a week ago was ranked number three.

He said in the next five years, they were going to have more champions, adding just last week they sent a karate team to Norway and five of them managed to win medals and two of those were gold.

“Honestly as Botswana we want to position sport as an alternative resource and revenue, when you look at the amount of volunteers who are driving sport in Botswana, we have a lot of people who directly work with development of sport,” he said.

He therefore urged Botswana representative in the competition to do their best in representing their country.

“I have been to a lot of champions, especially Olympics and world championships, but it is only in Athletics, Karate or Boxing where we are always leading and somewhere in the medal bracket, sport like Squash and other important codes we are not conquering the world yet,” he said.

For his part, Botswana Squash Rackets Association president, Tiego Rabasha said they had expected more countries to participate in the edition, but unfortunately they received apologies from some countries due to reasons beyond their control.

He said they have challenges in Africa in terms of growing sport, especially squash since they face a lot of challenges in terms of capacity in the form of facilities, trained personnel, and lack of finance to effectively implement their youth development programmes.

Development programmes, he said are characterised by lack of regular youth competition, adding they can work as hard as they can to develop the youth, but as long as they don’t get any robust competition it would be time wasted.

According to Rabasha, the solution will be to divide the continent into some regional blocks, which will have their tournaments synchronised with World Squash Federation. He said the regional block will have their ranking systems, therefore players will know where they stand regionally.

“The advantages of blocks are that travelling coast will be cut, because right now for us to compete, we need to travel to Europe and it come with a cost, the second advantage is that this will ensure a continuous improvement programme at a lesser cost,” he said.

He decried that most countries in the SADC region even those that do not participate in the All Africa Junior Champion like Malawi  are running their own annual Open, adding Lesotho don’t participate in the All Africa Games but they participate in the Commonwealth Games, saying that anomaly need to be addressed.

Squash Federation of Africa president, Hanny Hamouda said his federations always appreciate athletes who always find it fit to travel long distance to honour the competition given that their participation is very important.

He however urged the players to ensure that they behave well throughout the completion. Five countries; Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Egypt, South Africa will participate and will end on April 04. ENDS