Author: ELKANA KUHENGA
AfricaPress-Tanzania: THE Zanzibar Athletic Association (ZAA), has expressed readiness to participate in the National Athletic Championship, noting they have developed a strategic plan to select competitive athletes from their regions.
The competition is scheduled to take place at the National Stadium in Dar es Salaam on September 5th and 6th this year, where it was previously scheduled to take place in August 15th and 16th this year.
The postponement of the dates was announced on Friday by the Athletics Tanzania (AT), Communication Officer, Tullo Chambo who stated that it was due to failure to secure accommodation for the athletes on the dates of the event set before.
The competition will involve runners from every all regions of Tanzania Mainland and the Isles, and according to ZAA Acting Secretary General, Muhidini Yasin they planned to send 75 runners.
“We have put in place strong strategies where we expect to have 15 athletes from five regions of Zanzibar in this national level championship.”
“We have submitted our request to the sports council along with the Secretary General of the Ministry of Sport in Zanzibar, so we are waiting for his approval for athletes to begin training. Once he has given us a permission we will immediately start implementing the strategy.”
“In order to achieve this we have written a letter to the regional commissioners to inform them about the competitions so that we get the permission for this game to return as all sports activities were suspended by the government due to COVID-19.”
This is the second time for AT to postpone the championship. Initially, AT had stage the event in May but it was forced to reschedule it due to the outbreak of Covid-19 Pandemic. The government suspended all sports activities on March 17th this year before lifting the suspension on June 1st this year.
