What Tour du Rwanda success can teach us

For eight long days, I held my breath as, first Janvier Hadi, and then Valens Ndiyisenga wore the iconic Yellow Jersey in the grueling Tour du Rwanda cycling competition. From east to west, north to south, our boys outshone some of the continent’s best riders, a feat that had long eluded us. But as victory came ever closer I worried more and more. Could they hold on? Would a horrendous accident hand victory to the other teams? The answer to my questions was a resounding yes and no respectively. On Sunday, we crowned, for the first time, Ndayisenga, a local rider, as the winner of the Tour du Rwanda. While this victory gave me a huge sense of pride, I couldn’t help but ask, “why couldn’t our other national teams perform quite as well”? I think that the answer is obvious. The Rwanda cycling federation put in place a long-term plan of action and then EXECUTED it. They got a successful coach in Jacques Bowyer and let him do his job. They discovered potentially good riders and gave them the support, both technical and material, to train properly. They built a cycling school of excellence in Musanze District and they helped finance Team Rwanda’s European sojourns. Finally, they sought and got sponsorship from the private sector so they did not have to depend on government handouts. The cycling body’s long-term strategy for success doesn’t seem like rocket science to me. But looking at how so many of our sports teams are doing, it would seem like it. Currently our football team isn’t playing continental football because it was caught with its pants down. All because, in my opinion, the football association refused to invest in the long-term future of the national team and instead chose the shortcut. Team Rwanda didn’t choose the shortcut. And because it didn’t it will probably remain competitive for the foreseeable future. Maid abuse must open our eyes I watched a video a few days ago that left me totally scarred. I’m sure that most people with a Smartphone have watched it as well and would agree with me that it is the most horrific example of child abuse they have ever witnessed (outside the 1994 Genocide of course). A maid in Kampala, Uganda was secretly filmed violently slapping an 18-month old girl across the face, throwing her across the tiled floor, hitting her bare buttocks with a flashlight and then stamping on her back repeatedly. After the maid’s arrest and imprisonment, the shocked child’s mother told the media that the maid had been soft spoken and seemingly loved the child. The video got me thinking; how could I protect the children I eventually planned to have from a similar fate? Assuming that the child’s mother would take care of it full-time would be a fool’s errand especially because most families now need both salaries to pay the ever-increasing bills we are saddled with. It would even be much more complicated for single parents. Could I get nannies from professional cooperatives that vetted their members to make sure that they knew what they were doing AND, most importantly, loved children? Could the child’s mother’s workplace set aside an area and convert it to a nursery for their workers’ children? Putting our heads in the sand and pretending that a lot of scary things aren’t happening when we go to work isn’t tenable. The days of leaving the raising of children to semi-illiterate househelps should be no more. My laissez-faire attitude has taken quite a hit and I don’t think I will ever be the same. If you’ve watched the video I’m pretty sure neither are you. The writer is an editor at The New Times.

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What Tour du Rwanda success can teach us