Council hits out at athletics body over infighting
Malawi National Council of Sports (MNCS) has accused the Athletics Association of Malawi (AAM) of focusing on petty issues such at the expense of developing the sport.
The council’s sports development officer Ruth Mzengo said this on Saturday when she closed a six-day training workshop for 33 coaches drawn from all the three regions at the Kamuzu Institute for Sports (KIS) in Lilongwe.
She asked coaches earmarked for athletics centres of excellence to stay away from ‘politics’ that has engulfed the athletics mother body if the country is to do well in international competitions, citing the Regional Five Under-20 Games scheduled for Botswana in December this year.
Mzengo observed that misunderstandings within the AAM over last year’s elections have affected the sport’s standards “which have completely gone down” to the extent that athletes are failing to perform well both locally and on the international scene.
She said: “While MNCS has tried its best to support athletics, AAM has failed because they are busy with petty issues such as squabbles and we want you [coaches] to concentrate on drilling young athletes to win medals in Botswana and not politics.”
She said this is why her office organised the training for development coaches.
But AAM general secretary (GS) Frank Chitembeya, while admitting that the standards of athletics have gone down, hit back at the council, saying it deliberately underfunds their activities.
“The council has played a role in the infighting and at the same time it cuts our budgets and this leads to poor performance on the part of athletes.”
“For instance, you submit a K2 million budget and you get K1.7 million, how can one work?” queried the AAM GS.
The coaches were trained in planning, nutrition, anatomy and physiology, among others.
The participants commended facilitators Ephraim Mzengo and Denis Phiri for imparting knowledge in them but expressed worry on how to implement it due to lack of equipment, a situation Mzengo said her office will address. n
