31 Jan 2018

In their effort to touch base with National Sports Associations (NSA), Ministry of Youth Empowerment, Sport and Culture Development will hold Sport Pitso in Palapye on February 3.

The ministry’s permanent secretary, Kago Ramokate said in an interview that they had consultative meeting with Botswana National Sports Council(BNSC) and Botswana National Olympic Committee (BNOC) board.

“BNOC and BNSC briefings are fine, but interacting with NSA is very important because they might raise issues that will help the ministry fill identified gaps,” he said.

Furthermore, Ramokate said he was of the view that as a ministry, they had been far from NSA and they found it paramount to get closer to them and get first hand information.

However, he said the ministry had an idea as to what should be done to improve sport in the country, adding that chanelling it through the boards might take time, rather than giving the idea to administrators on the ground directly.

Ramokate said they called for items  from the association while the ministry also tabled its issues, adding that the issues would be  consolidated for discussion during the Sports Pitso.

“On the agenda, we have Botswana Gambling Authority to come and talk to NSA about lottery issues as you might be aware that some teams are using Short Message Service and they were stopped by Gambling Authority. So they will explain to the NSA the right procedure to go about it,” he said.

He said they were also expecting Botswana Unified Revenue Services to make a presentation on how tax rebates worked and what could be done to improve the law.

He said concerning tax rebate law, they had always been advised that the law needed to be improved, adding that they had never had the details as to what was wrong with the current law from the sport perspective.

“However, we have some sport issues that were submitted by the federations, like issues of sport excellence as they want to make suggestions on issues of remunerations, allowance and incentives.

They also want to share with the ministry how those can be improved,” he said.

On other issues, Ramokate said the ministry was happy with results posted by national teams .

He however said they were of the view that sport admirations had to be improved given that their performnce was lagging behind compared to performance of athletes in the field.

“Although the issue is not finalised, the desire is to have full time administrators, and the other issue is people who are contesting to be elected. The question is do we still want to leave it open or is there anything that we can recommend,” he said. Ends