21 Feb 2018

Botswana is tipped to host the next African Union Sports Council Region 5, regional annual sport awards next year.

AUSC Region 5 projects and marketing manager, Siyabonga Sangweni said in an interview that the awards were part of the region’s programme and it was agreed that they would be hosted on a rotational basis.

South Africa, he said, hosted the inaugural awards in 2016 and their term ends this year, hence they were looking at Botswana to take the baton.

“They have to rotate like the games so that every member country should have an opportunity to host these prestigious awards,” he said.

According to Sangweni, South African government did a good job in building the awards, adding that as it was, the awards were now at a point where they could survive without government funding.

He said they did not want to burden governments with funding RASA, adding that currently they were busy engaging commercial partners in Botswana to see if they could partner with AUSC Region 5.

“It is still at an infancy stage, but we know that there are other two countries that can host these awards successfully and they are Namibia and Swaziland. So we are engaging all of them including Botswana,” he said.

The benefits of hosting the awards he said, was sport tourism adding that business was going to be created and they would also position the country as a desired destination of choice.

“Botswana is a beautiful country, very safe, very clean. It has very attractive areas for tourists, but for some reason Batswana are not selling their country. I personally think there should be more efforts to sell this beautiful country,” he said.

Sangweni said the awards were important because they recognised winners from the 10 countries who had won at the national level.

“For example, we take winners from Botswana and put them against the other winners from the nine countries . Really it’s the best of the best,” he said.

The AUSC Region 5 projects and marketing manager said RASA gave athletes another layer of recognition, adding that there was a committee of technical, coaches and sport administrators that was formed by the region to look at the profiles of athletes and make a decision.

Furthermore, he said all the categories were aligned, “The sport person of the year in Botswana, will be put against the sport persons of the year in all the nine countries to allow  the committee to choose the three nominees from each category who are then voted for by the media,” he said.

Meanwhile during the inaugural RASA awards, Baboloki Thebe (athletics) and Naomi Ruele (swimming) won both the junior male and female Sportsperson of the Year in 2017. Junior Sportsman of the Year was won by Karabo Sibanda. ENDS