Ugandan club football should look South for some answers

Three days were recently well spent by your columnist in Tanzania’s bustling metropolis of Dar es Salaam with its unmistakable coastline and sprawling suburbs. The nature of the working trip meant that much less time, if any, was spent on the crystal-white sands and tropical turquoise waters.
Business and not pleasure took yours truly to the suburbs of Chamazi and Mbweni.
After an hour’s bumpy ride on a dirt road taking your columnist past the odd mangrove forest and ubiquitous green wedge of baobab trees, the Azam Chamazi Complex appears within the eyeshot. From outside the complex looks unremarkable, even commonplace.
The gate that lets you in is anything but swanky. I will tell you what is stylishly luxuri-ous…almost everything that lies inside. First up are neat rows of conjoined terraces that house the playing and back-room staff of Azam FC. Wow! The stadium with a synthetic grass pitch, stands, commentary box and floodlights. Wow! A medium size swimming pool where players recondition. Wow! A training ground where the first and youth teams hone their skills. Wow-ish.
“Ugandan clubs should visit this place and borrow a thing or two,” former KCC coach and now Azam FC assistant coach, George ‘Best’ Nsimbe smiles.
The next day your columnist’s first journey (a nervy one at times!) in an auto rickshaw — or Bajaji as locals in Tanzania call them — ends on the sparkling coastal sand of Mbweni. Simba SC are at Ndege Beach being taken through their paces.
Eager to exorcise demons of the 1-0 loss to lowly Stand United, players try to push the envelope so as to impress Goran Kopunovic, the club’s Croat coach who is sitting on a ball. Four of the players (Emma Okwi, Joseph Owino plus the two Serunkumas, Dan and Simon) working up a sweat are Ugandans.
The fifth Ugandan player, Murushid Jjuuko, is sitting out the training session in Okwi’s silver Progres car with a groin injury. Since signing from Sports Club Victoria University, Jjuuko has won himself many admirers, including Kopunovic who fielded the Ugandan youngster ahead of 30-year-old Owino before injury struck. “Club football is a cut-throat business here in Tanzania,” an official from the Tanzania Football Federation secretariat tells your columnist.
A lucrative one, Simba SC’s coordinator, Salim Swaka, later adds on our way back to the city centre. Eighteen-time Tanzanian topflight league champions, Simba makes Shs55m on a monthly basis from, Swaka reveals, its assets, friends (most of whom are business moguls) and gate takings. Such a turnover has allowed them to shoulder an outlay that is anything but modest. Next month, Okwi will become Simba’s highest earner thanks to a new $3000-a-month (about Shs 8.7m) deal.
Swaka gives a chuckle while revealing that Jjuuko recently lifted the lid on his plans to stay put in Tanzania for “some time”. It’s easy to see why: the grass is being watered on the other side. Ugandan club football has to wake up from its slumber and start treating football as an industry; not a pastime where everything is sacrificed at the altar of greed.
What Azam FC and Simba SC are doing can be nonchalantly pulled off if responsible figures step out of the time warp.

[email protected], @robertmadoi