Uganda: Why Ugandans Can No Longer Run, Jump Or Box

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The Monitor (Kampala)

COLUMN
26 August 2008
Posted to the web 27 August 2008

Charles Onyango Obbo

Not too many expected that Uganda's team to the Olympic Games in Beijing would return with a gold medal. But quite a few expected a surprise; an inspired dash - or punch - by one of our athletes or boxers that wins gold.

It didn't happen. We returned home empty-handed. Uganda is not alone. About 70 per cent of the countries that go to the Olympics don't get a single gold medal, and about 50 per cent get neither silver nor bronze.

The example of Britain, which had its best performance in the Olympics in 100 years (it was fourth in the medals table), and China, which achieved its goal of topping the gold medals league, would seem to suggest that the key to Olympic success is to pump money into training and infrastructure.

But that would be missing the big picture. If we go back to the 1960s and 70s when Uganda performed better in the Africa Cup of Nations, the Commonwealth Games, and won its first and last Olympics gold via the quick legs of Akii Bua, the sports stars were not the products of a central state-sponsored sports programme.

Nearly all of them were students, junior officers or employees of the Prisons Service, the Police, the Army, the Lugazi and Kakira sugar estates, Uganda Posts and Telecommunications, Uganda Railways, Uganda Commercial Bank, Uganda Railways, or Kampala City Council.

There used to be hotly-contested school trials at the district and regional levels, and then they met in a giant clash at the national trials. All these are no more. Six years ago I visited a few schools in the country that used to be sports giants. The headmasters' and teachers' wives are drying cassava on the remaining patches of cement floor of what used to be basketball courts. And the football and the running tracks are now potato and beans gardens.

State enterprises like Uganda Commercial Bank, Posts and Telecoms and others, have been privatised, a fact which pleases me immensely. The money that they used to spend on sports is now managed as part of these companies' corporate social responsibility (CSR) budgets. What we supporters of privatisation didn't foresee was that these privatised companies, and indeed the many firms that have grown over the years, would spend most of their CSR money sponsoring beauty pageants and goat races instead of sports, immunisation, and scholarships.

As for the Prisons Service and the Police, the conditions are so bad for the rank and file, they live in toilets that have been converted into bedrooms and manage two square meals a day only by the grace of God.

In the countryside, as illustrated by an infamous case in Tororo some years ago, you can't tell the difference between Prisons officers and prisoners. All of them moved about with trousers frayed at the knees and behind, with dusty buttocks peeping through.

Even at Makerere University, spaces that were gymnasiums many years ago have now been turned into cramped accommodation. Thus today Uganda is in the situation where the only decent gymnasiums are private ones where men and women with some money in their wallets work out to cut down their pot bellies.

Therefore, even if the government put up billions of shillings at the centre for an Olympics team, it will go to waste if the schools, KCC, Police and Prisons, are not feeding sportsmen and women into the national pool. So the investments should be made in the schools, Prisons, Police and other areas that used to supply the sports people. But if you sink money into the schools and Services as they are today, it will just be stolen or be squandered. So you need a far-reaching reform of these institutions first. So there is, actually, no sports solution as such to Uganda's abysmal record.

The thing with Uganda that's even more disturbing, is that it is has declined in areas where it had established a tradition of excellence - boxing, football, middle distance running. If you take Ethiopia and Kenya, their governments don't splash billions on sports. But these countries have been traditionally strong in the middle and long distances races, and they have retained their excellence in these disciplines, amidst turbulent politics and changes of government.

In Ethiopia and Kenya, the top athletes are not all products of schools sports programmes, but also of the sporting tradition which, in the Rift Valley for example, sees hundreds of children running barefoot in the hills every morning hoping to be the next Paul Tergat.

In Jamaica, a tiny island, a reporter who has chronicled its dominance in the sprints wrote recently how some years ago he went to a slum, and was surprised that at dawn dozens of children turned out to run - all them in spikes - before they did anything else.

One explanation why such grassroots sports development didn't and isn't happening in Uganda is the Local Council (LC) system, which allowed the state to micro-manage every aspect of life that happened outside our bedrooms, but it's a long story that we shall return to in the future.

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