Sports joins fight to save environment

For a long time, the Malawi sports fraternity has played a bad role in contributing to environmental degradation while doing nothing to conserve it.

But for a change, sports men and women took the first step in helping to conserve the environment by planting trees at Chigumula Township forest in Blantyre at the end of a day-long Malawi Olympic Committee (MOC) workshop that came under the theme Sports and Environment.

Environmental consultant William Dumbani Nyirenda and Leoh Banda, Forestry Department’s plantations manager responsible for Ndirande and Chigumula and other speakers advised athletes, coaches and officials from various sporting disciplines that it was not late to save the endangered environment.

In their closing remarks at Malawi Sun Hotel, MOC vice-president Flora Mwandira and Malawi National Council of Sports executive secretary George Jana delivered a strong message that domestic sports can no longer ignore environmental degradation.

“Sports represent friendship. This friendship is done in a friendly environment, so you must ensure that we are in a friendly environment,” Mwandira said, citing a clean environment, proper waste disposal and tree-planting as some of the roles sports can play to reduce damage to the environment.