Develop, don’t ditch the Brave Warriors

DEPUTY Minister Pohamba Shifeta has reached a boiling point. His consternation was evident when he spoke at the launch of The Namibian Newspaper Cup.

He was expressing the concern that some of us have expressed and written about: the concern that twenty one years later, Namibia remains a developing nation in sports, soccer in particular. Twenty one years later we still send athletics development teams to China when we cannot show what development programs we have for them at home. Twenty one years later, the Brave Warriors and their gladiators remain training ground for others, in part due to the absence of development programs and tenuous commitment to these on the part of the Namibian state.Like Deputy Minister Shifeta I maintain the view that all is not well in the arena of soccer in Namibia. But, unlike the Deputy Minister, I do not believe that disbanding the Brave Warriors is a solution to our long held problem that has become a challenge indeed and threatens to be our addiction: this is the belief that when there is a problem in sports, in youth development, in education; in health, all we need to do is to avail money and the puzzle will be complete.Namibia’s soccer is ham-strung not by the absence of resources called money, but by the absence of that self-conscious capacity to provide vision, direction and programme. And this is called leadership. For instance, we have thrown money at the Brave Warriors through the state and through the private sector and by the soccer loving public itself through gate takings. But each time we get embarrassed out of the soccer pitch elsewhere, we come home and sing the same note: ‘we shall overcome’.Therefore Minister, the solution to our problems in soccer is not disbanding the serving team of the Brave Warriors only to substitute them with yet a team of players and managers, selected through an unclear modus operandi and perhaps through connections to the contemporary political order in sports.I maintain that by substituting the serving team with yet a team in the absence of proper planning, we shall continue to beg the problem for a solution. For our challenge seems to be not the quality of players and certainly not that of coaches and soccer managers. These are of age in my view.The difficulty we have is one of the absence of a long term plan for soccer, deeply rooted in the absence of youth development through soccer clubs, not through federations and controlling bodies. It is soccer clubs not federations or controlling bodies that form the cradle of football in all societies. They create the ground for soccer as an institution, scout talent in their community and form winning teams. But there is limited interest in helping the clubs to develop and form the necessary backbone to soccer through enhancement of youth programs, starting from the junior leagues, all the way to senior development programs. Normally, development support goes to federations and soccer houses and one wonders how much of this filters through to the cradle of soccer talent and the mainstay of football joy in every society: the Football Clubs. We can ditch the serving Warriors and reinvent the wheel ten times over, we shall not make progress in our soccer for as long as we have not aggressively started the process of enhancing soccer talent through deliberate development of our soccer clubs. And that is where the efficient use of available resources falls into question.

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