EDITORIAL: Liverpool legend’s challenge to Tanzania apt

It’s not every day that a country gets the chance to host players who, during their heydays, set the English Premier League alight, for four days.

But that has been our privilege with former Liverpool captain Sami Hyypia, one of the best defenders of his generation, spending four days in this country on a tour aimed at reviving our game.

We can’t ignore the fact that our football has had a fair share of its challenges on and off the field.

The Liverpool legend was frank in his appraisal that our game isn’t where the world expects it to be, and that things have to change for the better.

He, among other things, noted last week that football academies are the foundations of competitive football.

We agree with him and we shouldn’t be blinded by the rare success that our national Under-17 soccer team, Serengeti Boys, achieved recently in Burundi, where, for the first time in as many years, they won the Cecafa Youth Challenge Cup.

Amid all that euphoria, we shouldn’t forget that over years, our teams, both at club and national level, have been faring poorly in international competitions.

We should also not forget that we have failed to make an impression when it comes to the Africa Cup of Nations and World Cup qualifiers.

We should not ignore the fact that the nursery, which used to supply the national team with talented players like Jella Mtagwa, Abdallah Kibadeni, Sunday Manara, Leodegar Tenga and the others, has seemingly been abandoned.

We haven’t seen quality new boys coming to play for our national teams for some time now.

It is through investing in the youth ranks that we can hope to build a winning team for the future.

We have gifted youngsters, even though it is a relatively small base compared to what we had in the past.

Tackle rural poverty

If the report of a survey by Afrobarometer that polled 2,400 respondents is anything to go by, living conditions in Tanzania remain far from being ideal, what with a majority of the people in rural areas invariably describing their living conditions as ‘bad.’

Conducted last year, the survey was coordinated by Policy Research for Development (Repoa).

According to the study findings, almost two-thirds of Tanzanians living in rural areas described the country’s economic situation and their personal living conditions as “fairly bad” or “very bad” – compared with 56 per cent of city dwellers.

In 2017, four-in-10 Tanzanians said they went about their daily businesses without enough food to eat at least once a day during 2016. About 27 per cent of them stated that they went hungry “several times;” “many times,” or “always”.

However, the report also shows that 62 per cent of the respondents believe that Tanzania is on the right track despite the debilitating poverty.

They base their optimism on government efforts to improve the management of public resources, and the ongoing corruption crackdown. Fifty-nine per cent of the respondents believe that the government is handling the economy “fairly well,” or “very well,” as the income gap between the rich and the poor has ostensibly been narrowed from 26 to 31 per cent compared with the 2014 survey. Let’s combat poverty in earnest.