State of local sport needs review

I don’t know whether it was a coincidence or just a matter of natural occurrence, but the time I started writing about Rwandan sport, in the first quarter of the last decade, sports in this country was in a sound health state, and I wish I could say the same about its current condition. Back then, it was pure pleasure to be a sports writer in Rwanda because everything seemed to be moving the right direction, fans were still passionate, people running sports were not as money hungry as they are now, and last but not least, the government was very much interested in supporting sport. But how times change! Eight years down the road, things seem to be moving in reverse, fans are not passionate any more since there is very little or nothing to cheer about, the insatiability for money and power of people running sports has reached unprecedented levels, while the government appears to have become reluctant to pump so much money in sports anymore. Between 2002 and 2006, Rwanda was kind of the model for running sports in the region as Rwandan teams dominated their regional rivals and at times beyond, and everyone thought the country was going places but somehow things started to take a nose dive. So, until the relevant powers realise and do something in form of reviewing the state of the country’s sports to halt this decline, we are more likely than not to become a yo-yo country in sporting terms. By the time I started working for The New Times as a sports reporter at the start of 2003 up until around 2006, Rwanda was a force to reckon with in football, volleyball, handball, basketball, athletics [long and middle distance], tennis and even boxing was doing ok, but that’s no more, and we sort of need to go back to square one to bring back those good old days. Yes, I’m talking about the good old days when Amavubi was ranked as high as 68 in the world after the 2004 Nations Cup, and visiting teams would be happy to take a point at Amahoro stadium. Days when the names like Jimmy Gatete, Mohamoud Mossi, Desire Mbonabucya or Hamad Ndikumana would send chills through rival teams even before a ball is kicked in anger.Back then, the volleyball federation was the most organized and well managed in the country and the national league was so vibrant that our clubs KVC, APR, NUR were dominant in the region. Now they hardly manage to organize the league consistently.In basketball, APR and Espoir basketball clubs were two of the major forces in the region and both clubs were made up of home grown players, a factor that made the league competitive and the fans were coming in droves to support their teams. Now the national team is full of bazungus and even though it does well during Zone V competitions and the fans are always coming in big numbers, that isn’t trickling down to the national league where the levels of competitiveness have drastically gone down. Handball, which between 2002 and 2005 had become one of the fastest growing sports in the country and our teams were competing in regional tournaments, is now struggling to survive even in schools where it had taken root. And further still, what happened to the national schools’ sports federation? Does it still exist? On paper, yes but in reality no, but to what end? Athletics, which everyone thought back in the mid 2000s that it was a field where Rwanda had an edge over the rest of its neighbors, [bar Kenya] because of our high altitude, appears to have gone to the dogs. The federation [RAF] is in deep slumber and needs a good Samaritan to come to its rescue as it has the potential to do much better. Because of poor management, Rwanda is no longer the force it once was and it will take so much more than changing leadership to produce another Dieudonne Disi or Matias Ntawurikura. Barely eight years since people from near and far were talking big about Rwanda becoming a regional sports heavyweight, here we are stuck in a situation where almost everyone involved in the running of sports in Rwanda has either become corrupt and they’re in it for selfish interests or they’re just not [administratively] fit enough for the task of developing the country’s sport, which is in a very poor state. What’s the Rwanda National Olympic Committee up to? We don’t hear any noises coming out that body, are they comfortable with the status quo? Whoever will be made the new sports minister to replace Joseph Habineza should make reviewing the state of our sports his or her first priority. nku78@yahoo.com