Africa-Press – Namibia. EXORBITANT costs and crippling debts have led to the Brave Warriors’ withdrawal from the African Nations Championship (Chan) competition.
The NFA announced their withdrawal from the competition on Thursday, which was confirmed by the acting general secretary of the Namibia Football Association, Jacky Gertze, two days later.
“Of course Chan is a very important competition, especially if the countries are playing premiership league football, and you know this competition was brought in by CAF to cater for players who play in the local league.
“Now we all know that Namibia has not been playing league football at that level for the past three years, and although that would not be a reason to withdraw, the biggest reason is the financial status that the association currently finds itself in,” she said.
“The competition was going to cost us N$18 million, which would have been really difficult for an association that is under a normalisation process where one of the important mandates of the Fifa normalisation committee is to rectify the financial situation of the association,” she added.
Gertze said that one of the first things that the NC looked at was the financial status of the NFA and they soon discovered that its debts had ballooned to more than N$23 million.
“There were meetings for more than three weeks with the finance department to just consult and go through every aspect of finance, starting from the audited financial reports to the actual credit list and supporting documents around the credit list, and in those three weeks the debt escalated to N$23 million, and that is just what we know. By now there are also legal issues going on which can also escalate.
“There are very important service providers and people who are stakeholders of the NFA in the national competitions, in league football, in the day-to-day running of the association that need to be paid, and if we ignore that and continue to participate in three competitions in a year with one team, I think that will look a bit irresponsible from our side,” she said.
Gertze, however, confirmed that the Brave Warriors will compete in the 2023 Afcon qualifiers as well as the 2022 Cosafa Cup competition.
“The NFA has committed itself to the Afcon 2023 qualifiers – the Brave Warriors are currently in Johannesburg, where they played a training match against Lesotho which they lost 2-1.
“They will now remain in camp where the rest of the professional players will join them, so the coach will have some time to see what the team looks like and prepare for the Afcon match against Burundi on Saturday,” she said.
“Our next Afcon match was supposed to be against Kenya, but they have now been suspended, which is of course that is very good news for Namibia, while it also gives us a chance to continue to source funds for our next qualifying match in September.”
Gertze said that Namibia will then participate in the Cosafa Cup, before taking on Cameroon in their next Afcon qualifier in September.
“Cameroon are the defending Afcon champions and you really want your team to play against countries like that. Also if you look at the mathematics, this is one of the best chances for Namibia to qualify for Afcon, and especially if we want to host Afcon 2027 with Botswana, it will be very important for our team to be part of Afcon,” she said.
Gertze said that they were currently in talks with Botswana about the possibility of staging Namibia’s home matches in Botswana.
“Johannesburg is a big city and it comes with a lot of costs, to host other teams, and to take care of the safety and security, as well as the medical care that is now a highly sensitive issue for CAF and in that regard it becomes very expensive for a football association like Namibia.
The costs of playing in Johannesburg are about six times more than playing at home, so the NC has been in talks with Botswana about the possibility of playing our home matches there. That process is ongoing, but it will certainly help our budget, if we can play our games in Botswana until all our stadiums are ready to host our games.”
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