28 Jul 2021

Tuelo Serufho has been at the helm of the Botswana National Sports Council (BNSC) for 50 days now and sports lovers are eager to see how the man turns around this largely ailing sector.

Counting from July 21, Serufho has exactly 50 days to go before the end of his first 100 days as BNSC chief executive officer.

The question arises as to whether the public is already getting a sense of the type of a leader Serufho is and most importantly, whether or not he is on a good trajectory to achieve what he laid out as part of his roadmap at the beginning of his tenure.

When talking to the media a month and a half ago upon his appointment to the highest office in Botswana sport, Serufho said then that he would have about five key priority areas.

At the top of the list is his desire to reform the funding model for Botswana sport, with a view to achieving better results and greater impact.

He also intended to restructure Botswana sport to enhance efficiency and effectiveness to drive the implementation of the long-term athletes and coaches’ development frameworks to improve results.

Governance within sport at all levels has been found to be a rare commodity and he said he was eager to see it improve.

Finally, he hoped to diversify and increase the revenue base of the commission through commercialisation of some of its aspects.

He admits that having been with the commission for a few months before being appointed substantively certainly means that he had some head start in some respects.

“Notwithstanding, I am happy that we have made quite some progress. For starters, we have successfully categorised our national sport associations (NSAs) into four tiers, with the top tier getting the bulk of the funding available to NSAs for the 2021/2022 financial year,” he said.

The idea was to focus a sizeable chunk of funding on a few NSAs, such that they were better able to develop athletes, coaches and other personnel, prepare for competitions as well as exploit their commercialisation potential.

Over time, he said the NSAs should not only have a lot of Batswana participating in their sport, they should also be consistently achieving good results from international competitions as well as generating substantial income on their own, to the extent that the government, through the BNSC would need to spend less on them.

“At that point, we will elevate a few more NSAs to the priority group such that they too get enhanced support,” Serufho said.

Regarding re-organising sport, Serufho said progress was made as a model had been identified and consultations around that were ongoing. “All things being equal, Batswana could see a new BNSC or Sport Act coming into being in July 2022.

With this, we hope to achieve better efficiencies and ensure that we not only eliminate wastages, but also ensure that every pula spent in sport development takes us farther than is currently the case,” he said.

On the implementation of the Long Term Athlete Development (LTAD) and coaches development frameworks, Serufho stated that this financial year, a zero based budget approach has been adopted and for every activity, there had to be an appreciation of what long term goal the activity is driving.

“We will for example, not be funding event teams, but rather teams with long term plans. We want NSAs for example to start assembling athletes with the potential to represent Botswana at the Los Angeles 2028 Olympic Games so that we have a few years to prepare them.  Of course we will not ignore other aspects of the LTAD such as grassroots programmes and social sport, inter alia,” he said.

With respect to improving governance within sport, Serufho said there was good progress.

“Very soon we will be requesting the BNSC and BNOC to approve ‘minimum governance standards for Botswana sport. Of course the most important part is enforcement of those and that is what we shall be focusing on as the Commission,’ he said.

Ostensibly not eager to blow his own horn, Serufho did not mention that notwithstanding the impending approval of the standards, his office was already at work to enforce governance within sport.

This publication has it on good authority that since taking over at the commission, Serufho has already suspended a few national sport associations on account of poor governance.

In addition, the publication has gathered that employees previously put on suspension for suspicion of graft have now been fired, after being found guilty of some of the offences they were charged with.

With regard to increasing and diversifying the commission’s revenue, the ‘Chief’ as he is affectionately known said that a lot of work still needed to be done.

He said while they had some assets that they could exploit for commercial returns, they obviously must remain alert to the fact that their main object was sport development, and as such there would be the need to find that fine balance.

“Of course we urgently need do that as it is clear that government’s purse is unlikely to grow significantly in the short to mid-term, given the prevailing economic challenges, mainly induced by COVID-19,” he said.

He, therefore, said a win-win solution between developing sport facilities and revenue generation was inevitable given that revenue generated from the assets that they had would have to be ploughed back into sport development.

Some of the sport administrators are of the view that behind the respectful and seemingly docile Serufho was a very strong, fearless and focused man.

They are of the view that he has already started the journey towards delivering on what he has promised, in some areas much more than in other.

It is indeed to early to say award any marks, so only time will tell on both his leadership style and efficiency, and next couple of months up to the end of the 2021-2022 financial year will be be critical. ENDS