Charles Onyango Obbo
26 August 2008
column
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.
Read comments. Write your own.
Copyright © 2008 The Monitor. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections — or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here.
AllAfrica aggregates and indexes content from over 125 African news organizations, plus more than 200 other sources, who are responsible for their own reporting and views. Articles and commentaries that identify allAfrica.com as the publisher are produced or commissioned by AllAfrica.
NRM privatised the parastatals for what ? For a song ? They devalued the shilling and literary robbed the people of thirty percent of their money. Most of what passes as privatisation in Uganda is an outright sell out. What happened to Uganda Commercial Bank ? What is going to happened if it has already happened to Mabira Forest ? What happened to AGOA ? What happened to UPDF fighting the LRA with ghost solidiers and commanders selling weaponry to LRA, the very people they were supposed to be fighting ? What about the decayed schools? The decayed medical system ? There are no hospitals and those that Obote built forty years ago have fallen apart and there is no medical services in them. How anybody can transform a sick and illiterate society is beyond reason, science, economics, or common sense. I could go on and on but the point is clear. This is a failed government concocted and run by air brained corrupt and selfish authoritarians. All they are good at is ordering, intimidating, abusing, torturing, and curtatiling peoples rights and freedoms; in short terrorising people to submission so that rule and plunder for ever. That notwithstanding this piece you wrote attempts to truly captures the level of social decay Uganda has sank. When Akii Bua won a gold medal in 400M hurdles in 1976 one would have thought that would have, as in many other countries, inspired the country to follow in its footsteps but that did not happen. Why ? The answer is simple: Museveni and his NRM have destroyed all that was good in Uganda. It is has been replaced with a shameless cynicism of selfishness that caters to individual survival instead of national themes of development and social advancement and progress. You hate to politicise this but the reality is that all Museveni and his cohorts care for is how long their military will last in power. The rest of the country or national issues can go hang. Where is atleast one national overarching theme that NRM has established since it has been in power longer than any regime in the history of the country ? None. The night sleep they offered to Luwero ? What an insult. Or is the myriad of schools that graduate pupils who can't read and write ? Or the hospitals that cant deliver a baby so that Museveni himself had to fly his daughter to Germany to deliver her child; hospitals that can't treat nobody ? All we have is are pseudo-socialist hair brain grassroot organizations called Local Councils that bear no connections with the peoples traditional institutions of rule, law and order. Sometimes when you attend some of these councils meetings and functions it feels like Uganda has been invaded an aliens. When we studying at Makerere University we met, studied, played, debated, and socialized with people from all over country and beyond, including students from African countries such as Zimbabwe, Nigeria, and of course East Africa; and we built truly nationalistic and Africanist bonds. One would be hard pressed to find the same national pride and unity bonding that existed then, now. Kenya and Ethiopia are good examples. How different are they from Uganda that they are performing way better than Uganda at the international arenas ? Uganda is failed state that imagines because they have solidiers standing guard watching while they are being raped and robbed by the same solidiers they are safe and peaceful. What are delusion.