Netball - Uganda’s unsung export

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WHAT’S UP!

There are people I know who, when it's time for elections, leave the country for at least 2 months. I used to regard them as unpatriotic; at best, cowards. If you don’t take part in electing your leader, what right do you have to complain if they mess things up?

But as the years went by, I began to see their side. Uganda’s elections can be depressing, even painful. And the big question is, why do we do it? Why, every five years, do we inflict this pain called elections on ourselves?

I have a colleague, Dr Joseph Walusimbi, who stood as Mayor for Kira. I asked him why he did it, but he never quite made any sense to me, apart from saying it was his civic duty. Civic duty? How many people in Kira even know what ‘civic’ means?

He said he was not going to bribe voters or buy them sugar or salt. Or give them t-shirts. Not even rallies with big-behinded women shaking their stuff on stage to excite the public. He said he was running a grassroots campaign in which he personally talks to voters.

Unfortunately, Dr Walusimbi did not win, but it is almost impossible to know how he performed since there is no central place to access the results. Almost a month after the elections were held, the Electoral Commission website still has 2021 results.

Everywhere I go, I see posters, not of hopefuls, but mostly losers. Was it all worth it? In a functional democracy, it is the call to serve that makes citizens stand for elective office.

But in Uganda, we of course know that bucketfuls of losers see public office as the quickest way to make a buck. Now almost all of them are wondering where they will get money to pay for school fees next week. Really depressing stuff.

But I was browsing through Facebook (pssss, don’t tell Baryomunsi) and a post popped out at me - a smiling netball player with a Ugandan flag next to her. Apparently, Singapore had recruited a bunch of netball players from African countries, including several from Uganda, to play in their elite league, the Deloitte Netball Super League.

Okay, the Singapore Deloitte Netball Super League is not as big as netball leagues in, say, Australia, the UK or even New Zealand.

Those leagues have player salaries as high as $60,000, but not much information is available on the Singapore one. But the fact that some very good players from Uganda, Malawi and Zimbabwe (Africa’s netball powerhouses) have been recruited means it is no peanuts.

Prominent among the Ugandans was Haniisha Muhameed (lately of the Surrey Storm in England), and Faridah Kadondi (Nottingham Forest Netball). It was not immediately clear if this was a permanent posting or if the girls would only appear for the second round of the league. But clearly Singapore was ‘stoked’ to have them, as one official put it.

Uganda is a funny country, as many have often put it. While coffee is obviously the export that brings in the most money (lately the figures show gold, but I’m not sure whether that is really our product, or from ‘you know where’), every government official worth his potbelly is mouthing about the need to promote tourism.

I don’t know of any Ugandan who has promoted the country as positively as our girls who play netball. Time and again, often against ridiculous odds, they have brought Uganda pride where there was scorn and even outright hostility.

How many young girls in the world want to be like Peace Proscovia? How many people in the UK and Australia want to come and see the country that made Mary Nuba the great player she is? How many netball academies in the world tell the story of the She Cranes, girls whose own government ignored, but who went on to conquer the world?

Yet it is amazing (nay, shocking) that the Government does not bend over backwards to make it easier for the netball girls to do what they do best – beat the world. Amidst all the looting and stealing and robbing and the suffocating corruption, surely some official must look and say, “…wait a minute, these girls are doing us good, let us support them”.

Imagine if all that money put aside to teach Ugandans how to drink coffee was given to the She Cranes and the general netball infrastructure, we would be ruling the netball world. But although close to sh10b was spent, Ugandans still prefer to drink tea and malwa, and the She Cranes still don’t have enough money for training.

I don’t know how many of our girls are out there playing professional netball, but they must be quite a number. Every time the national team, the She Cranes, plays an international game, more people get to know and love Uganda. These girls have what is rightly called ‘vibe’, and the world sees it and loves it. Hopefully, they get to love the country too.

But when they get to hear of all the odds the girls have to go through just to show that ‘Ugandan vibe’, I bet they get second thoughts. Someone surely has to do our girls right.

Before this, the only time of the year Singapore came on my radar was when Formula One hits their street circuit, but now I’m going to check out how Haniisha and Faridah are doing.

These girls are really superheroes. Imagine now they are selling Singapore to Ugandans. And our government just says ‘meeeeh’.

Follow Kalungi Kabuye on X (Formerly Twitter) @KalungiKabuye