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Tanzania’s Sporting Quagmire – Time to Call for General Hagai Mrisho Sarakikya’s Silver Bullet

todayOctober 15, 2024

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ON a certain Friday, July 21st, 2017, Dar es Salaam’s indoor stadium was buzzing with excitement for the national basketball championships.

But while the crowd was focused on the court, I found something just as monumen tal sitting quietly outside. Three men sat comfort ably chatting like village elders under a baobab tree, reminiscing about the good old days. Instinctively,

I grabbed my camera and approached them, respectfully asking if I could capture the moment. Their enthusiasm was infectious and I took what might be one of the best pho tos of my career.

As I snapped the shot, younger journalists nearby looked on in confusion. Who were these gentlemen I was so excited about? They were, after all, giants in Tanzanian history, though sadly, their legacy seemed lost on the new generation.

The trio: General Mirisho Hagai Sarakikya in the center, flanked by legendary athletes Filbert Bayi on the left and Juma Ikangaa on the right.

These are names that should be engraved in gold in our history books.

Sarakikya, Tanzania’s first Chief of Defence Forces (CDF), served from 1964 to 1974, shaping not only the military but also the nation’s sports landscape as the chair man of the Tanzania Athletics Association (TAA) and later as Minister of Sports.

Bayi and Ikangaa, mean while, are two of Tanzania’s most celebrated runners. What makes this picture extraordinary is not just who these men are, but the era they represent a time when Tanzania dominated global sports.

Then, it was not just about participation; it was about winning, and General Sarakikya was at the centre of it all. Let us rewind to his year, when Tanzania was a force to be reckoned with in athletics. Under his leadership as TAA chairman and later as Minister of Sports, athletes like Filbert Bayi, Juma Ikangaa and Suleiman Nyambui did not just participate they crushed records and brought home medals.

The military discipline Sarakikya instilled seemed to spill over into the nation’s sporting achievements. Who can forget Bayi’s legendary 1,500-metre world record?

Or Nyambui’s silver medal at the 1980 Olympics? Even Juma Ikangaa, whose marathon triumphs have become Tanzanian folk lore, owes a part of his success to the structure Sarakikya put in place. At one point,

Tanzania even sent a field hockey team to the Olympics yes, hockey! That’s the level we were oper ating on. Sarakikya had this rare ability to transform raw talent into international champions. It is almost like he had a silver bullet for athletic success.

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So, why are we not knocking on his door today,asking for some of that old magic? Fast forward to the present and Tanzanian sports feel like a shadow of their former self.

Medals are not exactly piling up anymore. Football, thanks in part to President Samia Suluhu Hassan’s initiatives, remains our shining star. But in other sports, especially athletics, we are struggling.

If you ask me, this is not for lack of talent. It is about leadership and structure something General Sarakikya had in spades.

Today, though, the two main organisations in Tanzanian athletics Tanzania Olympic Committee (TOC) and Athletics Tanzania (AT) seem to be locked in a rivalry more intense than the compe titions themselves.

The saga of the TOC and AT is a tale as twisted as a marathon through the Serengeti in the middle of the rainy season.

You would think, with both organisations standing tall under the Tanzanian sun, their primary concern would be seeing Tanzanian athletes shine on the global stage, right? But no this is Tanzania, after all, where we sometimes seem to prefer ‘kugongana (colliding) over teamwork.

It is like watching two sprinters trying to run the same race in opposite direc tions. On one side, you have the TOC, founded back in the day when people were still trying to figure out what time zone Tanganyika was in.

Their mission is grand Olympic level, in fact tasked with pushing athletes towards the ultimate dream of global gold.

You know, the Games, the rings, the whole shebang. And then, on the other side, there is AT, the national guardian of track and field, determined to develop and polish Tanzanian athletes, sending them sprinting, leaping and racing through every event imaginable be it Olympics,

Commonwealth, or even your cousin’s weekend fun run. Now, in theory, this sounds like an ideal marriage of sports bodies, right? TOC handles the Olympic biz, AT works on getting the athletes ready for action and Tanzania collects medals like baobab seeds.

Unfortunately, in practice, this situation is more like a couple squabbling over who gets to drive the car forgetting the fact that the car has a flat tire and neither one seems to have a jack or a spare wheel.

The crux of the matter is that these two entities, despite their shared love for athletics, cannot seem to work in sync. Back in the glory days, when General Sarakikya was calling the shots, things ran smoother.

The TOC and TAA were like two hands on the same body different roles but working in harmony. But now? It feels like we have got a left hand trying to dribble while the right-hand attempts to shoot result: someone’s face is about to get hit with the ball. The problem is obvi ous: too many cooks in the kitchen.

Or, in this case, too many officials trying to stir the athletics pot, but instead of creating the right stew, they are just spilling the beans.

TOC wants to ensure Tanzania shines at the Olympics, but they cannot do it alone. AT wants the same, but it cannot do its job properly if it is locked in a tango of turf wars with TOC. The communication lines between the two are thinner than an athlete’s lane in a 100-metre sprint. So, what is to be done?

Well, we could sit back, blame both sides and let this saga play out like one of those endless Turkish series. Or we can roll up our sleeves, gather these two entities around the same table and call in the referee. Preferably someone authoritative with a whistle loud enough to drown out the bickering.

Enter the new hero on the scene the current Chief of Defence Forces, General Jacob John Mkunda. At the climax of the CDF Cultural Competitions this August, General Mkunda made a bold declaration: the military is ready to help fix Tanzania’s sports problems. He is calling in the troops literally.

Even Mwana FA, the Deputy Minister for Culture, Arts and Sports (yes, that Mwana FA), backed Mkunda’s plan.

The Honourable Mwana FA knows that if anyone can whip our athletes into shape, it is the military. This brings us back to General Sarakikya.

If anyone has the wisdom to revive Tanzanian sports, it is someone like him, because his era was not about power struggles or who had the fan ciest kit sponsor. It was about results General Sarakikya unit ed sports bodies under one vision: winning. And win we did, on the global stage. have a jack or a spare wheel.

The crux of the matter is that these two entities, despite their shared love for athletics, cannot seem to work in sync. Back in the glory days, when General Sarakikya was calling the shots, things ran smoother. The TOC and TAA were like two hands on the same body different roles but working in harmony.

But now? It feels like we have got a left hand trying to dribble while the right-hand attempts to shoot result: someone’s face is about to get hit with the ball.

The problem is obvi ous: too many cooks in the kitchen. Or, in this case, too many officials trying to stir the athletics pot, but instead of creating the right stew, they are just spilling the beans.

TOC wants to ensure Tanzania shines at the Olympics, but they cannot do it alone. AT wants the same, but it cannot do its job properly if it is locked in a tango of turf wars with TOC. The communication lines between the two are thinner than an athlete’s lane in a 100-metre sprint. So, what is to be done?

Well, we could sit back, blame both sides and let this saga play out like one of those endless Turkish series. Or we can roll up our sleeves, gather these two entities around the same table and call in the referee.