FOR sometime now, the Sports Council of Zambia (SCZ) and National Olympic Committee (NOC) have been on a collision course with each body seemingly overstepping its boundary.
Despite SCZ and NOC roles being well defined, these two important national sports bodies still clash when it comes to preparations and Zambian athletes’ participation at international events like the Olympic, Commonwealth and All Africa Games.
NOC is a Zambian Chapter of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and is also a local administrative body for the Olympic, Commonwealth and All Africa Games.
The NOC’s mission is to promote and uphold Olympism in Zambia and ensure national teams’ effectively participate in these international competitions by assisting with capacity building and training.
NOC, whose vision now is for Zambia to score gold at the 2020 Olympic Games, also want the local athletes to embrace Olympic ideals while pursuing excellence in sports and their lives.
As for SCZ, it was formed under an Act of Parliament to administer Zambian sport on behalf of Government.
Some of the functions of SCZ are to disseminate the sports policies of Government, register national sports bodies and ensure all groupings conform to the rules and norms of governing the particular sport.
SCZ is also tasked to develop, promote, control and encourage all forms of amateur and professional sports on a national basis in conjunction with national sports associations.
Assisting financially or otherwise, any team or individual representing Zambia in any competition in or outside the country is yet another task of SCZ.
SCZ is also expected to establish the status of national teams and create a conducive environment for sports development, control, regulation and promotion of sports.
Some of the roles of SCZ and NOC are clearly overlapping and this is to some extent is creating a problem between these two important organisations whose affiliates are the same national sport associations.
Therefore, Government’s intentions to merge SCZ and NOC could be the answer as currently the working relationship is not all that healthy.
Our colleagues in South Africa managed to get over this hurdle in 2004 when they merged the two and other sports bodies to counteract the fragmentation in institutional governance.
This was done by a ministerial task team which looked into high performance sport.
So from that merger came the South African Sports Confederation and Olympic Committee.
However, it is yet to be seen if this kind of merger can be possible in Zambia.
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