Runaway athletes

“When we go there, we know that we have gone to compete, we know that the entire country is watching us and we will concentrate on the performance,” Kipsiro says.

He said it is easier for athletes from other sports to think about disappearing and search for better life because these tournaments do not act as a platform upon which they can realise their dreams.
Kipsiro says he finds Ugandan runners more dedicated to their profession.

“It is all about what one wants to achieve in their discipline,” he says.

Still, Kipsiro says, whenever runners are in the sports village at international venues, they are always being monitored by the officials all the time. He says this might not be the case in other disciplines where officials are lax and do not follow up the athletes. Sometimes the officials are also out on shopping sprees, he says.

“When the sportsmen and women go for the tournaments, they have little morale,” he says.

But Bashaija, a former athlete and sports journalist, told The Independent that the problem is unlikely to stop soon because “conditions in Uganda are not all that conducive for sportsmen”. He says federations are not to blame and making athletes sign a code of conduct and retaining their passports throughout the tournament, will not stop them vanishing.

“In Glasgow, every athlete handed in their passport to the Uganda Olympic Committee as a control measure but that did not help,” he says, “the guys vanished without their passports.”

For sports administrators, the trend of young sportsmen and women choosing to stay away from Uganda is worrying since they keep losing talent.

For instance, when two boxers disappeared in Australia, the boxing fraternity added them to another talented 11 boxers who have stayed abroad over the last decade.
Four years ago, at the Glasgow Commonwealth Games, two rugby players, Benon Kiiza and Phillip Pariyo, disappeared.

Last October, Uganda’s Rugby Sevens team again lost three players—Ramathan Govule, Brian Kikaawe and Fred “Pepe” Odur disappeared after the Oktoberfest Sevens in Munich, Germany.

A Sub-Saharan problem

Kipsiro says the trend of vanishing athletes is not good because it gives Uganda a bad name.“In future it might be difficult for Ugandan sports men to be invited for certain events,” he says
Julius Acon, a retired Ugandan middle distance runner who currently represents Otuke County in Parliament, makes the same point.

“Ugandans already have a bad image in most consulates and embassies,” Acon who is also the Vice Chairperson of the Parliamentary Committee on Education and Sports told The Independent.
He says increasingly it is becoming difficult for Ugandan athletes to attend international events because they are denied visas.