EDITORIAL: Sports governing bodies must deliver results

At this time of the year, sports bodies are busy preparing calendars of game events to be staged in the coming months.

Apart from this task, these governing bodies are also drafting training programmes as well as budgets for the series of the events to be conducted as per the international calendar.

This practice has been going on for years. However, it has not brought about much fruits. This lack of results suggests only one major problem--leaders of the governing bodies lack commitment.

In the past years, it was not uncommon to hear that sports events had been postponed for what was termed as ‘lack of funds’. Such excuse only serves to hinder sports development in the country. Bad enough, some athletes last year went to the extent of digging deep into their pockets in order to fund their own training.

This trend probably explains why for many years Tanzania has shown dismal performance in most of the sporting events it is represented in by its teams. Country’s athletes failed to shine in continental and global sports events. All this stems from lack of commitment on the side of sports bodies’ leaders. They fail in several fronts, including: attracting funds; organising rigorous training sessions; and maintaining the welfare of the athletes. The governing bodies cannot only wait for government subsidies. It simply doesn’t have enough fund to cater for over 30 such bodies.  It’s high time, sports leaders came up with tangible and result-oriented strategic plans that will push up development of games in the country.

These plans must be comprehensive and show how key resources would be raised, the training structure, how trainers would be obtained and maintained as well as having many trial events.

It’s time sports stakeholders were engaged in the development of games in the country. Let leaders work with them.

The sports governing bodies must inspire them to back sports developments.