It is time for hard questions

What a monumental mess… everybody seems to be in agreement that domestic football finds itself in a precarious situation after MTC pulled their conditional and provisional commitment to sponsor the Namibia Premier League (NPL).
That decision has meant that we are staring into the reality that there will be no topflight football in the country next season. As the only level that comes close to being professional with clubs paying salaries to their players, the effect of not having such a league will certainly be disastrous on a number of people.
I’m not going to go into detail about the effects that a lack of topflight games will have as I believe they are well documented.
I’m also not going to pretend that this has not been a long time coming because while some of us have consistently said that we need to fix what is wrong at the grassroots level, the powers-that-be have viewed that as finding fault with their initiatives.
But instead of apportioning blame, I also don’t think that is the right thing to do at the moment either.
Instead, I think this is the time to ask ourselves some hard questions. The answers will leave a lot of us uncomfortable but they need to be asked regardless.
For starters, this situation has exposed the reality that football and indeed sport can no longer be viewed apart from education.
These two go hand in hand and quite frankly you can’t be a sportsperson and not have some sort of education.
And to say that sports stars are not necessarily the sharpest tools in the shed is a total misconception.
One of my high school teachers used to say that you can’t say that a footballer does not know mathematics because all football is, is a game filled with various aspects of the subject.
Squares, rectangles, triangles, measuring trajectories, arithmetic and calculations are all involved when it comes to football. All footballers understand this even though they might not be able to express it on paper.
I can go on about this but the point is the days of footballers dropping out of school in pursuit of stardom must come to an end.
Secondly, and a point related to the first, is the fact that football is now a business and in order to run a business successfully one needs to be boardroom savvy.
It is no longer enough to say that “I’ve been in football for years” if you don’t understand how professional entities are run.
The world and how things are done are both changing at an increasingly faster pace and administrators need to keep up with what is happening, so that they know what needs to be done locally.
That attitude of ‘this is how things have been done’ has led us to this situation but we need to ask if we want a repeat. Because in simple terms, even if the league gets the necessary funding tomorrow, I can bet my last dollar that in a few years we’ll sit with a similar scenario.
Thirdly and most important in my view, we need to do away with the notion of exclusivity that sport administrators have the habit of showing most times.
Our recent national history has shown what damage exclusivity can cause. But it seems administrators have not learnt from that. In short, you can’t run sport with just your friends.
You need to have as many voices as possible because it is those voices that will be able to point out pitfalls whereas your friends are likely to just agree with whatever you say.
Fourth, we can no longer afford to avoid those with experience, positive or negative.
As an example, we need to hear what advice a Pieter van Wyk would have for the incumbent NPL chairman, the same way in which it would be wise to pick the brain of Oscar Mengo, whose name cannot go without mention in Namibian football. I can say the same about previous national team coaches and now retired administrators.
Lastly, we need to ask why clubs like SKW and Ramblers opted to take a backseat when it comes to the NPL. What is it that made them realise that they don’t need to prioritise being in the elite league? Is it perhaps that exclusivity attitude or is it something altogether different?
I have to say I agree with the school of thought that says we must start from scratch but I’m also quick to add that it will be no use just changing individuals for the sake of giving an appearance that things will change.

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