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BAA races the clock to build 2028 African Champs
KENNETH MOSEKIEMANG（https://weekendpost.co.bw/author/kmosekiemangweekendpost-co-bw/） 2 weeks ago 761 8 min
In Botswana, the applause from one triumph has barely faded before the demands of the next begin. So it is for the Botswana Athletics Association, which now finds itself in a familiar and unforgiving position: racing against the calendar to assemble the machinery for the 2028 African Senior Athletics Championships, a continental showpiece it won the right to stage but has not yet begun to build.
The association is moving to establish a Local Organising Committee and a skeletal secretariat – a lean operational core – to carry the preparations forward. Botswana secured the hosting rights earlier this year, a coup that places the country in line to welcome some of the continent’s finest athletes and adds another marquee fixture to a sporting calendar that has grown steadily more ambitious.
The clock, however, is already running. And Oabona Theetso, the BAA’s acting president, is adamant that no corner of the country’s athletics community should be left on the sidelines.
The Ordinary General Meeting scheduled for Palapye on October 24 is expected to serve as the launchpad for that conversation, shaping the structure and composition of the organising committee that will, in turn, define everything that follows.
“For the African Championships, we want everyone to be involved,” Theetso said. “This bid was won by Batswana for Botswana.”
It is a statement of intent as much as a description of process – a signal that the BAA regards the championships not as an event belonging to the athletics association alone, but as a national project with national ownership. The posture is deliberate, and it is also strategic.
The weight of a benchmark
Botswana does not arrive at this moment untested. The country’s recent staging of the Debswana World Athletics Relays thrust it into the global athletics spotlight and, by Theetso’s own reckoning, supplied an invaluable reference point for the task ahead. The experience, he believes, is an asset. It is also, inescapably, a measuring stick.
“I think the World Relays will always be used as a baseline,” Theetso said. “But if you look at the stature of the World Relays versus the African Senior Championships, one is a global stage while the other is continental.”