AfricaPress-Tanzania: A CALL has been made to sport stakeholders in Zanzibar to come up with clear guidelines, which will fuel to bring back glory days when the country used to be a powerhouse in sports sector. This was said recently by Zanzibar president Dr. Hussein Mwinyi during an exclusive interview with the ‘Daily News’ as he insisted that his administration will do whatever necessary to fast track sports development.
“I like to listen to sport stakeholders because they know what is going on in this sector and are always eager to show the way forward. “I have since instructed the minister responsible for sports to continue meeting with concerned sport stakeholders so that all challenges facing sports sector can be identified and later, find long lasting solutions to them,” he said.
He added that with the ongoing efforts by his government to scale up sport activities, he has no doubt that in a short period of time, adequate measures to eradicate prevailing shortfalls will be found.
He then named conflict and lack of sponsorship as among the major factors retarding the development of sports in Zanzibar.
“There are many conflict cases recorded in various sport governing bodies and most of them emerge as a result of monetary issues. This leads to theft and corruption hence no progress is seen in this essential sector,” Mwinyi noted.
About lack of sponsorship, he narrated that no sport activities can be run smoothly when sponsors are not available saying a team from Pemba can hardly travel to Unguja to play a league match since financiers are not present.
“What I believe is that we will soon start to solve one problem at a time and by doing that, the past sports reputation of Zanzibar will be restored. “In those days, even teams from Tanzania Mainland used to fear their counterparts from the Isles due to big level of competition they used to have and that is where we want to go,” Dr. Mwinyi said.
