BONGANI MALUNGA
The incumbent president of the Botswana Football Assocaition MacLean Letshwiti has underlined the importance of building and maintaining stakeholder relationships after securing partnerships with their Slovakian association, German Olympic Sports Confederation and Morocco football association, deals he believes will continue to yield results for the local association.
In the second part of his exclusive interview with Gazette Sport, Letshwiti stated that the association has been on a mission to build relationships and partnerships with international federations to yield assistance from the esteemed federations for the benefit of their youth and women’s teams.
The BFA signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with Morocco Football Federation in 2017, that was swiftly followed by another partnership with the Slovakian and German associations. The latter partnership has seen BFA secure the services of football administration expert Dr Carolin Braun who is currently orchestrating the development, coaching and coaching education in Botswana. The relationships with Slovakia and Morocco have seen Botswana gain free permission to use both countries’ world class training facilities for training purposes as seen by the Botswana women’s teams having training camps abroad in recent years.
“There should be a fine balance in what we want to achieve, we want excellence on the pitch and excellence off the pitch as well. We need to ensure that we are able to produce top quality coaches and administrators as well, the youth and our various national teams need to learn from coaches and admins who have gone through proper training so that we ensure quality all around the system. Our relationships with Slovakia and Morocco have given us access to the best training facilities for our youth and women’s teams, this shows that we have been able to build good relationships,” Letshwiti stated.
Letshwiti stated that the BFA’s relations with the Ministry of Youth, Sport and Culture is at an all time high in terms of being cordial. Over the years the association has not enjoyed the best relations with mother bodies in sport but according to the president that has improved drastically as they have the Ministry on board in many of their projects.