The Sunday Mail
Veronica Gwaze
THE growth of old students associations, groups of alumni who feel obliged to give back to their alma maters, can help revive schools sport. With school coffers increasingly empty OSAs have become a conduit of hope. However, most of the donations are channeled towards the academic end with little or nothing finding its way to the sporting arena. But there is an encouraging narrative that is slowly emerging with the Dalny Mine Secondary School Old Students Association last weekend pledging to also focus on helping the Kadoma school recapture its glory on the sporting front. The association’s president Nathan Banda urged OSAs across Zimbabwe not to forget the sporting side of things when they give to their former schools.
“As day-to-day operations become more and more difficult for schools the extra curricula activities suffer and funding to areas such as sport dwindles.
“The tendency is always to celebrate academic excellence while ignoring the pupils who are talented in sport. Our approach is that if you played tennis at school buy some rackets and hand over to a budding player at your former school,” he said. DOSA, since its inception in 2012, has helped build new infrastructure, donated stationary as well as paid fees for orphans and other vulnerable students.
The next step, said Banda, was refurbishment of sporting facilities.
“Seeing your school falling down from both academic and sporting grace hurts and the question you then ask yourself is ‘if I the former student cannot rebuild this school whose duty is it?’ It’s a call of duty one cannot ignore.
“We also believe that having state of the art sporting facilities encourages students to take up sport which in turn gives birth to a healthy pupil.” After receiving the latest consignment of good from his school’s former students, Dalny Mine Secondary School acting deputy headmaster Timothy Mushawatu applauded the OSA.
“OSAs have come to the rescue of many orphaned and vulnerable children because these days we no longer have facilities such as bursaries that help the disadvantaged.
“It is also encouraging that attention is also now being given to sport because the country is losing talent as some pupils are walking away from the field because they lack basic equipment such as cricket bats and running spikes,” he said.
