Club face the axe

The Botswana Football Association (BFA) president Tebogo Sebego has called for the improvement in quality of local club administrators in the effort to take the local league towards professionalism.

Sebego was speaking during a two-day CAF licensing seminar held in Gaborone early this week. The seminar was held to help local clubs comply with CAF license regulations so they can compete in continental tournaments like the Champions league and the Confederations Cup.

“For as long as we keep our quality where it is, we will continue to get the same results, if not worse, when the rest of the Africa and the world move on to prosperity,” he said.Addressing delegates including officials from BFA, Botswana Premier League as well as the media and CAF experts, Sebego said football leadership in Botswana continues to be affected by the quality of club leadership in general.

“This is a great source of worry, for it is from our clubs that we draw the national leadership. We have identified a huge gap in this area, and we have taken a position to come up with programmes that would over a period of time improve the general leadership of our club and hence the national leadership,” Sebego told the delegates.

In addition, Sebego said football cannot go any far with club and national administrators who are not adequately capacitated in areas of leadership and management, as well as   in the simple basics of corporate governance. Sebego emphasized that administrators who come into their structure have to somehow be connected with football.

Meanwhile, Sebego said when he came into office he advocated for the commercialisation of football. “As we pursue what we can refer to as a suitable model or models towards this dream, you would agree with me that commercialisation would never take off on structures that are still firmly founded on volunteerism and amateurism,” he stated.

The BFA president called for the minimum requirements that local clubs should meet. Where requirements are not met, the club should not be licensed and such clubs should be deregistered from our leagues, for they would not only fail to qualify for CAF club competitions, but they would also continue to negatively affect local football’s progress.

“You will recall that when club licensing hit our shores, we went through a consultative process at the end of which we came with the Bosele Declaration in 2008,” he reminded the delegates. Later on Sebego explained that they came up with the Bosele Declaration 2, which did not take them far. “Now we need to introspect and find out why these couldn’t take off.”