As the Botswana Karate Association (BOKA) national team fights for glory more than four thousand miles in Accra, Ghana, back home, a storm – not in a tea cup – is brewing over the team selection.
Some affiliates are crying foul that the team selection is devoid of merit and is corrupt. They say some karatekas who did not deserve to be included in the team were selected ahead of deserving ones.
Questions are now being asked as to how, when and where these players were chosen as well as the criteria that was applied. Aggrieved athletes and affiliates want to understand why those who were initially picked got abruptly dropped.
As far as they are aware, karate selection championships are still ongoing here in Botswana. For athletes to be eligible to go represent the country, they must be the top performers across the board in all tournaments.
They argue that two of the athletes in the team that is in Accra did not deserve selection. They say the two athletes had lost some of their matches in the ongoing local championship selections and were not the best in the previous selections as well.
With this in mind, they say they fail to understand how the two athletes are now representing the country in the continental games while those who won against them are left behind.
Responding to the allegations, the President of Botswana Karate Association (BOKA), Sensei Mpho Bakwadi, says the selection was done on merit. He says the current team is made of athletes who made the cut last year and were expected to compete at the African Games that same year.
“All Africa Games were supposed to be last year and then it was postponed to this year. That year we had national team selections. And so, that team is still there and they qualify for the All Africa games, especially those people who performed well at region 5 in Zimbabwe last year,” he explains.
Unfortunately for the Karate association, they were not prioritized when BNSC selected codes to compete at All Africa games. They only received a last-minute invite from BNSC to select a small team to take to the continental games.
Faced with the choice of either selecting a small four athletes’ team for the games or not send a team altogether, he says they had to make hard decisions. “If you had ten athletes who qualified for the Africa Games and you were given only four slots, what would you do? Will you say, no we are not going or would you send your best four that you can select from the ten?” Bakwadi asks rhetorically.
He says given that it was a last-minute invite, they also could not have had time to do selections. The invite prompted that they act fast in choosing those they felt were the elite and could represent them well.
Commenting on the current events, a source within the BNSC confirmed that Karate’s invite to send a team was done at the last minute. He says unlike codes like athletics, volleyball and boxing, BOKA was not among the codes earmarked to compete at the Africa Games.
“It is a fact we told them late. We prioritised sports that are on the Olympic programme. So, karate is not in the Olympic programme, so we had not prioritised them.”
“One of the reasons we could not prioritise them was that our budget at the time could not accommodate them. However, we recently got confirmation that we are getting support from the alcohol levy fund. So, we were able to include them,” the source reveals.
The source says considering the late invite, it is not surprising that there are issues surrounding the Karate team selections. The source says the same cannot be expected of sporting codes on the Olympic programme as they were long given invites and had time to undertake proper team selections.
Attempts to get comment from the BNSC proved futile as the chief executive officer was not available.
