Majidah Nantanda is Uganda’s first female national coach for the country’s women’s football team. Credit: Amy Fallon/IPS

By Amy Fallon
KAMPALA, Aug 23 2014 (IPS)

Growing up with five brothers, soccer-mad Majidah Nantanda had half a team to compete against at home in Makindye, a suburb in Uganda’s capital, Kampala. But at her school, in the 1990s, there were two sports rules: “Netball for the girls and football for the boys,” recalls the 32-year-old, as she stands on the sidelines of a boy’s game in Makindye.

“So I’d sneak out of netball to watch the boys play.”

From the age of eight, her brothers realised they had some fierce competition so they introduced her to the neighbourhood boys, who Nantanda would play with during her holidays.

“My mum never told me you’re not supposed to play football,” Nantanda tells IPS, adding her single mother, a businesswoman, bought her a kit and later gave her transport money to go to games.

Despite only getting a chance to perfect her talent in her spare time, it didn’t stop the Ugandan from captaining the first national women’s football team before becoming the first female national coach in 2007.

The country’s sports fans have been encouraged recently by Ugandan Stephen Kiprotich picking up gold in the men’s marathon in the London 2012 Olympics, and countryman Moses Kipsiro winning the 10,000m at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow earlier this month.

But “there is no sport that promotes Uganda more than football”, Federation of Uganda Football Association (FUFA) spokesperson Ahmed Hussein insists.

“Even if people go and win medals at international level [in other sports], nothing beats football,” Hussein tells IPS.

Nantanda says women playing football in Uganda has become more accepted over the past 15 years.

Today in this East African country there are at least 64 girls’ schools competing in the annual national secondary girls football championships, and many other women who aspire to be the next Nantanda.

This month, in fact, a team of 18 female footballers from Uganda could have travelled to Canada to participate in the FIFA U-20 Women’s World Cup.

“They would have been so happy. For most of them it would have been their first time on a plane, and for all of them, the first time in North America,” says Nantanda, who would have made the journey with them as coach.

But instead of being cheered on by their country some 5,000km away in Ghana, the ladies, aged between 16 and 20 years, are getting on with their lives after having their hopes dashed at the last minute by a governing body that hasn’t grasped the potential of Uganda’s female football players, says Nantanda.

Nantanda says just three days before the match in Ghana, FUFA announced on radio that they had withdrawn the team, citing a lack of funds.

“Women’s football is not a priority for the nation,” says the coach.

“We are not catered for like the men’s national team.”

She adds: “The Cranes [the men’s national team] are paid a lot of money but women, they don’t take us seriously.”

A total of 25 aspiring sports stars, coached by Nantanda, trained for months while also studying at school or university and while holding down part-time jobs.

Last September, the women beat neighbouring South Sudan 13-0 on home soil in Kampala.

In defence, Hussein says Uganda is the only country among FIFA’s 209 members that doesn’t have an annual designated budget from the government. He stresses that although the government is “passionate” about the game, often approaching with support, the money they give isn’t enough.

FUFA are funded by local corporations such as Airtel, NIC and Nile Breweries, ticket sales and FIFA development grants.

The United Nations have stressed the potential contribution that sport can make towards achieving the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), stressing it is about participation, inclusion and citizenship, and a certain percentage of FUFA grants must be spent on women’s football along with youth soccer and refereeing.

In 2004, Uganda’s football association was warned by FIFA that if they continued to use their yearly grant for the national team they risked losing it. In the past, FUFA have also denied corruption claims.

Nantanda sympathises with the girls. After all she has had her struggles.

“Not everyone’s happy that I’m a national coach,” she says, adding most soccer coaches in Uganda are male.

“A woman doing something different will straight away be attacked by men.

She adds: “If you’re not [emotionally] strong enough you’ll just give up.”

But that’s something Nantanda has never done, even when she’s been the only female alongside 60 men at an elite coaching session.

“I interact with these men and I do everything they do,” she says.

As one of only a few female FIFA-recognised referees in Uganda, Irene Namubiru, 34, has also smashed her own goals.

“[Women] enjoy playing football,” Namubiru tells IPS. “But they fear officiating because of the abuses, the insults from the fans, so they hold back.”

Nantanda doesn’t know when the under 20s team will play next.

Many women have stopped training and forgotten about football altogether.

Hussein says their Ghana match coincided with the men’s senior team travelling to South Africa for the African Nations Championship finals. Both competitions would have cost the federation “well over” 400 million shillings (153,552 dollars).

“People believe that the national senior team should be given a lot of precedence, as opposed to the women’s team or even to junior teams,” says Hussein.

“But we’re looking at entering the women’s team in future international tournaments.”

He says there could be a pilot project in the next couple of years in Uganda to form a women’s national football league.

“We believe that if the women’s team is properly handled they can get their own funding from different companies, the corporate world could come in and support them,” he says.

Nantanda still speaks to her under 20s and encourages them to train. But the coach, who admits she does mostly “volunteer work”, says she is putting more of her effort into “grassroots development”, encouraging girls in villages across Uganda to take up football through her charity Growing the Game for Girls.

Through Tackle Africa, Nantanda she is also getting rural communities hooked on football to teach them about HIV prevention and management.

There’s one piece of advice she gives all women, regardless of whether they have an upcoming tournament.

“Continue with your studies,” she reiterates.

“You won’t get paid through football.

“It’s not only about playing for the national team. I want these girls to be better women in the future and not waste their education.”

Edited by: Nalisha Adams

The writer can be contacted on Twitter @amyfallon 

Recently reconstructed Maracaná stadium in Rio de Janeiro. Credit: Governo do Rio de Janeiro CC BY 3.0

By Fabíola Ortiz
RIO DE JANEIRO, May 17 2013 (IPS)

As Brazil prepares to host several sporting mega-events, human rights abuses and authoritarian interventions by the authorities are going on behind the scenes, favouring major urbanisation projects and stadium remodelling, a study says.

The state has forced almost 30,000 families across the country to leave their homes, according to the Comité Popular da Copa e das Olimpíadas (World Cup and Olympics People’s Committee), made up of around 50 social movements, researchers, NGOs and trade unions.

The Committee’s report, “Megaeventos e Violações dos Direitos Humanos no Rio de Janeiro” (Mega-events and Human Rights Abuses in Rio de Janeiro), says that in this city alone, which will host the 2016 Olympic Games, 3,000 families have already been displaced from their homes and another 7,800 are facing eviction.

The forced displacement of thousands of people and the privatisation of public areas constitute the dark side of Brazil’s sports projects, claims the study which was presented in Rio de Janeiro on Wednesday May 15.

Brazil will host the FIFA (International Federation of Association Football) World Cup, which is to be held in 12 cities, in 2014. A dress rehearsal for this will be the ninth FIFA Confederations Cup, a tournament between the top national teams from each continent, from Jun. 15-30 this year.

“Our fears are being confirmed. The benefits and social legacy that are so widely trumpeted really hide a dark legacy: an elitist, segregated and unequal society. It is a sad thing to see,” said Orlando Alves dos Santos Jr., a sociologist and urban planner and one of the study coordinators.

In the view of dos Santos Jr., a researcher at the Observatório das Metrópoles and the Institute of Urban and Regional Planning and Research at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, the multi-million dollar investments carried out under the cloak of preparations for the World Cup and the Olympic Games go beyond the scope of sports facilities and are part of a grand project of urban reform.

Interventions in cities, like evictions, are having an immense impact in terms of social exclusion, the report says.

“We show that poor people are being relocated outside the areas of investment, which are concentrated in the centre, south and north of Rio de Janeiro. These are areas where real estate has vastly increased in value,” dos Santos Jr. said.

He said the rise in housing prices has been largely based on the displacement of the poor towards the outskirts of the city.

“All this has been accompanied by a complete lack of information for the evicted families, as well as coercion, the use of violence and human rights abuses. What is happening in the city is extremely serious,” he said.

Christopher Gaffney, a U.S. geographer who studies public policies on sports and security for big events, told IPS that evictions and the privatisation of public spaces represented a great failure of democracy in this country of over 195 million people.

“The policy is a big step backwards. It represents a reversal of values that eliminates the role of government as the guarantor of essential citizen services, like housing and culture. Forced evictions are a clear violation of the right to housing. Real estate speculation is rife in Rio,” he said.

Gaffney, who is also a member of the People’s Committee and a researcher with the Observatório das Metrópoles, said that there is no “coherent practical criterion” being applied in the eviction of thousands of families, and that those affected by the policy complain of a lack of dialogue, transparency and information.

“The uncertainty associated with being made homeless creates constant panic, and terror methods are being used to expel these people from their communities at any price,” he said.

“There have been cases where families have been told they must vacate their homes, without any time for them to collect their belongings; and others where their eviction has been negotiated right alongside the bulldozers that were ready to demolish the houses. This is enormous psychological pressure,” he said.

Only a few families received a decent house after their eviction, Gaffney said. The authorities provide indemnities for expropriation that are not enough to buy a new house, or they put families into housing plans that have requirements that many of them cannot meet, such as that the head of household must have a formal sector job and a bank account.

The report argues that the real Olympic legacy in Rio de Janeiro will be that of “an even more unequal city, which will exclude thousands of families and destroy entire communities…a project that will appropriate the majority of benefits for a select few economic and social agents.”

One of the main criticisms is the privatisation of public spaces worth millions of dollars. In Rio de Janeiro, sporting facilities like the legendary Maracaná stadium are being renovated, as well as infrastructure and transport facilities, and urban remodelling projects have mushroomed.

The initial budget for investment in the city for the upcoming events has risen by 95 percent, from 1.1 billion dollars to 2.1 billion.

Construction and renovation of stadiums represent nearly 25 percent of this total. Maracaná stadium, where the finals of the 2014 World Cup will be played and where the opening ceremony for the Olympic Games will be held two years later, is the focus of controversy because it has been granted in concession to a private consortium for 35 years.

The cost of the works undertaken was 600 million dollars, compared with the 370 million dollars initially envisaged. The concession of the stadium into private hands for the first time led the public prosecutor’s office to launch an investigation into the state’s investments for the sporting mega-events.

In Gaffney’s view, the sporting facilities will be transformed from cultural spaces into consumption centres.

“Stadiums are the platforms where local culture is expressed in football. It would be virtually cultural assassination to substitute faithful, traditional fans with ‘clients’ or higher class consumers,” he said.

Moreover, the private initiative will also lead to the demolition of a major aquatic park, a public school, an athletics track and a prison, in order to build two multi-storey car parks for 2,000 vehicles, a heliport, a shopping mall and a football museum.

“This shows the vulnerability of Brazilian democracy, even as Brazil is trying to build stronger institutions. The FIFA World Cup and the Olympic Games are accelerating anti-democratic processes,” Gaffney said.

Dos Santos Jr. said that society has taken the multi-million dollar renovation passively, and that construction of the Maracaná complex “will bring about the destruction of multi-purpose facilities that were used to practise other sports.

“It will only be a space for show and a commercial centre. Athletes in other disciplines will not have a place to train. And the entrance tickets will be too expensive,” he said.

The People’s Committee intends to present its study to public authorities, FIFA, the International Olympic Committee and international organisations such as the United Nations through its Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing.