The current crop must prevail or else…

I hate to say this but the current crop of Amavubi Stars players must produce the goods in the nation in the next three to four years or else Rwanda should forget about the dream to become a football superpower on the continent.For various reasons and for so long, Rwanda has relied, not entirely, but at least to a certain degree, on foreign players to represent it in different fields, but for purposes of this article, emphasis will be on football, the country’s biggest and most popular sport.About three years ago, the local football governing body, Ferwafa with financial and moral support from the ministry for sports and culture as well a few clubs, embarked on an ambitious youth development programme with the view to build a national team with a true Rwandan identity.The idea looked well-intentioned and because everyone concerned was reading from the same script and pulling in the same direction, it worked some instant magic in form of the U-17 team, which resulted in Isonga FC, and everyone was like, waoh, this is what the country has been craving for all these years.The government, being the main financier of the project, invested a couple of hundreds of millions of tax-payers’ money into the U17 team, starting from the talent detection level through to qualifying and playing at the Fifa U17 World Cup finals in Mexico.It cost so much money to assemble the team that played and reached the final of the 2011 African Youth Championships on home soil and to facilitate all the training camps in France, London, Germany and the US as the country prepared for an historic debut in the football’s biggest competition, albeit at the youth level.Because of the magnitude of Rwanda qualifying for the world cup, very few, if any, cared much about the large amounts of money being ‘thrown’ at the team to make the players ready for the big stage—after all it was the country’s pride at stake.When the team came from Mexico, Ferwafa and the sports ministry decided that the best way to keep their rhythm going was coming up with the idea of Isonga FC, which despite its controversial nature, was hailed as a bold move that would see the team play in the topflight league without going through the second division. However, less than two years later, ‘Project Isonga’ is in a free-fall on and off the field—the team was relegated to the second division after its funders pulled the plug off the cash flow, while its management turned from decent at most to chaotic, to say the least, in just one year.Nonetheless, the initial hard work paid off big dividends, especially looking at the current national senior team, which, apart from Uganda-born striker Meddy Kagere, is devoid of any form of foreign flavour something we had been accustomed to in the last decade.Rwandans have been yearning to have a team they can wholly identify with, and now that they have one, which is built around youngsters from the U17 team or the ‘first’ Isonga FC, the general consensus should be low expectations and allow the young squad to grow into a team, all Rwandans would be proud of.The problem about hoping that the current team would be a major force or at least among top 15 teams in Africa in the next four to five years is the absence of a new generation that would step up to fill the gaps that may need filling.The management of the relegated Isonga plans to release the current squad and start from scratch as they forge the team’s way out of the lower division back to the big time league.However, question is, when are they going to finish the process of talent search and prepare the team in time for the start of the second division league possibly in September? Its sounds easy but it’s far from the truth, and if Isonga are to make a quick return to the top division, its management needs to think and act with ambitions and stop operating, if am to borrow President Kagame’s description of local football managers, in mediocrity.The numerous academies like APR, SEC, Kiyovu and even the national football school at Ferwafa have gone silent since after Mexico 2011, which is a cause for concern because without their indispensible input, Rwandan football has no future.Without a proper system to bring through another group, it puts more pressure on the current crop to make sure Rwanda achieves its set target of being among top 10 footballing nations in Africa in the next four years, and if that fails, may we should forget about even dreaming.

Sports

The current crop must prevail or else…