Pastime posts derail sports, says Jana

The tendency to regard sports administration positions as a pastime is derailing domestic sports and football development in particular, Sports Council executive secretary George Jana has noted.

Jana was making a belated response to a questionnaire over a story published in Weekend Nation over local officials’ shunning of sports management courses which the council and the Malawi Olympic Committee (MOC) offer annually.

“Generally, the entire sports fraternity which includes football, has not taken advantage of the programme (course). Most of the people that have enrolled in the programme (forget that it is offered free of charge to them) are not those from the mainstream sports lines,” Jana explained yesterday.

So far the council’s certificate and advanced sports management course which the University of Pretoria (South Africa) offers have graduated 22 at the advanced level and 10 more are expected to finish. There are 40 also pursuing certificate level course. The whole course from certificate to advanced runs for three years.

Sulom general secretary Williams Banda partly attributed the apathy in the courses to lack of aggressive publicity of the courses.