Soccer and church stadium clash: Opportunities missed

Thulaganyo Jankey | Tuesday September 13, 2022 06:00

Before long some seemingly simple event that you thought you had understood completely has evolved into something completely different and usually far more bizarre.

A local team called Gaborone United (GU) is supposed to host a team from DRC. Nothing wrong with that. An international church is supposed to host a crusade. Nothing wrong with that.

The venue – National Stadium. Everything wrong with that as we have a same place same time situation. Both the church and the team feel they have a right to use the facility. The football team felt since the stadium is a sports facility, they should have first option. The church too felt that what God has decreed should not be undone by man.

Remember for proper Christians any event they organise is actually God’s will so they cannot have mere mortals trying to subjugate God’s will. The Botswana National Sport Commission (BNSC), who is the owner of the facility, had rung the cash register and when GU got there they were stonewalled with a ‘whoever pays first has first preference’ and ‘we too have bills to pay and do not run on sentiment’.

The BNSC has employed accountants who are smart enough to know there is no real difference between a P10 from a soccer team and a P10 from a church. GU then hastily arranged a press conference and their chairman was quoted as saying something like where he comes from stadia are used for soccer and not church services.

That irked the church section enough to push their Anger Metres to maximum. The nasty ones shirked their holy tags and claimed people in Lebanon (where the chairman comes from) are busy detonating bombs and have no time to play football.

However, the team accused the reporters of misquoting their chairman. Reporters apparently have a propensity to routinely misquote interviewees in an attempt to prop up sales and this was another such shenanigan.

Yes, there is definitely higher incidences of strife levels down here. Sometimes you can actually feel it hovering and festering in the air. Maybe Radithupa Radithupa should include a Strife Level in his weather forecast ('Tomorrow it will continue to be hot with a 60% chance of somebody getting fatally shot over an argument about what the time is'). In blabbering about this incident, I'm trying to make two points:

1. Abnormal events occur routinely down here.

2. When you probe beneath the surface of these abnormal events, you often find even more abnormality, whole unexpected basement nightclubs of abnormality. I believe a whole opportunity was lost in this case. Local football, which is struggling to attract decent crowds, had an opportunity right there at their doorstep.

GU could have piggybacked on this monstrous opportunity. I am thinking if the two would have collaborated, the local team would have had a large crowd from the churchgoers and made bumper ticket sales.

Church people are easy to convince - you just need the prophet to pull out a few menacing verses from the Bible that equate not buying match tickets to sinning and every congregant will make a beeline for the tickets. All the team had to do was speak nicely to the prophet.

There’s also another opportunity that would have had a positive result on the match against the Congolese team, which is a very tough team. Local teams have a pre-match ritual where one of the officials (who would have gone for consultation with a mutiman the previous day) will go round the pitch and drop some muti concoctions in the corners.

This is usually because they don’t trust the ability of their players to win a match even though they might not admit this outright. The muti is supposed to make goalposts invisible when the opponents try to score. Whether this works or not remains a point of dispute. The team could have boosted the power of this muti by getting the prophet to ask for God’s power to overcome the Congolese.

I mean what could be greater than God’s intervention in this case. The church, which is always fighting for audiences with sports codes, could also have leveraged the opportunity to win more converts to their church.

Every Sunday churchgoers go to sanitise their weekly sins in various churches. At the same time there’s also a whole section of the population that troops off to football grounds to add on to their weekly sins in most cases.

So any wise prophet will use this chance to get more converts from the football section. (For comments, feedback and insults email inkspills1969@gmail.com) Thulaganyo Jankey is a training consultant who runs a training consultancy that provides training in BQA- accredited courses.

His other services include registering consultancies with BQA and developing training courses. Contact him on 74447920 or email ultimaxtraining@gmail.com.