Why did the whole of East Africa miss out on the big Angola bash?

The whole of the expanded new East Africa missed out on the party in Angola. The boys of the African continent threw a noisy and colourful bash around a ball, and the five of us failed to come out and play. That is a big blow for our collective self-esteem, especially seeing as our people are soccer crazy.

Glued to their television screens watching the progress of the Coupe Africaine des Nations (CAN) through its various stages to the final, many of our youngsters were certainly justified in feeling they had been cheated out of a good thing and in asking themselves just what it was that kept their national teams out of the ball-kicking bonanza.

In a few months’ time, the footballing tribe of the world will hold its indaba in South Africa and once again, true to ourselves, we will be the no-shows. It seems we have condemned our youth to goggling in wonderment at their brothers from elsewhere writing poetry with their feet as if they themselves were physically disabled.

This is rather strange, seeing as there can be no physiological or mental attribute setting us apart from our brothers in West or North Africa. For crying out aloud, even Malawi and Zambia, literally “nose-and mouth” with us, were in Angola.

It is definitely not the lack of talent that holds us back but the way we organise that talent.

Immediately after taking over as head of state, Jakaya Kikwete, a sports enthusiast of the first order, promised he would support the country’s soccer body to help the country qualify for the CAN, which was to be staged by Ghana in two years’ time.

Among other things, the president recruited a Brazilian coach and paid his salary. The nation responded with fervour, the huge stadium in Dar es Salaam filled to the brim to watch the boys perform under the wizard from Rio, with each one-off win seeing the squad feted by Parliament… things were looking up.

Trouble is, looking is not going.

The initial enthusiasm has subsided, giving way to realism and acknowledgement of the fact that we are not out of the woods just yet. As everyone should know by now, you don’t solve any problem by throwing money at it; by so doing you may actually make a bad situation worse.

For one thing, soccer is a money-minting industry, and because that money suffers no undue oversight, soccer has the tendency to attract the least scrupulous of our citizens. Soccer organisations in most of our countries have created cultural webs of sleaze and impunity of such magnitude that they would have made a thief of Mother Teresa of Calcutta.

So, it’s not the money.

Nor is it a foreign coach. Of the four teams that played in the semi-finals in Angola, only one had a foreign coach. In their hankering after a foreign (read mzungu) coach, Tanzanians tend to forget that the brightest soccer period in the country, when we won the Gossage Cup for two successive years (1964-1965), was ushered in by the late Marijani Shaabani.

Who cares to remember, by the way, that the most illustrious performance of a Tanzanian club in the African Club Championship was by Simba (1974) when they reached the semi-finals, under another national, Paul West Gwivaha?

Self-doubt and self-derision are at work, not only in Tanzania but in the region as a whole.

We also are partial to quick fixes: Get a lot of money; bring in a mzungu coach; choose the best boys with the greatest skills; put them in training camp for six months; send them to Europe or Brazil for four weeks to get exposure; pay them fat allowances, and off we go to CAN and the World Cup.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t work that way. It takes painstaking work of many years, involving primary and secondary schools; the training of thousands of nameless coaches for the most basic of levels; grooming talents systematically across the country; growing school leagues where young talents compare notes and mature together, and sending the thieves to prison.

The alternative is what we have today: Watch television.

Jenerali Ulimwengu is a political commentator and civil-society activist based in Dar es Salaam. E-mail: [email protected]