Uganda’s national men’s basketball team, The Silverbacks opened their account at Africa’s biggest showpiece, Afrobasket yesterday in a clash against Senegal.
Inevitably, Senegal, who are ranked eighth in Africa were favourites against a thirteenth placed Uganda, as the two battled in the host City of Luanda, down in Angola. The Silverbacks will return to action tomorrow against a Mali side ranked twelfth, before they face Egypt, who are fifth in Africa on Saturday, August 16.
Ordinarily, Uganda, considering their ranking, and most obviously with a lesser resource envelope are punching above their weight. Yet, they have still been able to punch, although this time, The Silverbacks have been tested greatly on and off the court by the way the Federation of International Basketball Association (Fiba) runs the game.
Just days before the Afrobasket started yesterday, Uganda were beaten by news that two of their summoned players, Emmanuel Mugenga and Christopher Mubiru were ineligible to play. According to Fiba, the two youngsters were not certified as Ugandans despite their names, and the fact that their parents are Ugandan.
This announcement by Fiba was reached at when the players were already in camp with the rest of the Ugandan contingent in South Africa. Therefore, this would reduce the number of players available to play from the official 12 to 10. This is a big stretch on any team’s player rotation during a tournament.
Yet, even more importantly, is the Fiba rule that stops the two players from representing Uganda. According to Fiba, a player only qualifies to play for a certain country if they were born there. If that is not the case, and one was born outside the country they intend to represent, but have citizenship through their parents or grandparents, they must have claimed that citizenship before their sixteenth birthday.
Albert Ahabwe, The Silverbacks team manager said that they have made appeals against that rule for a while now. But Fiba has refused to budge to their requests through submitted information to prove the citizenship of these players.
This has denied Uganda a host of players that would ordinarily have been part of this squad. In many ways, this has gone a long way in denying Uganda its strongest team at the Afrobasket, but at the same time, disorganized preparations of the team.
Regarding the Fiba stand, it begs a question: How can a young Ugandan basketball player, aged 13, 14 or 15, still in school know that they would at one time be needed to play for their country, so that they apply for their citizenship before their sixteenth birthday?
Besides, at that age, a player is still trying to discover themselves, and they probably would not know whether they will be pursuing a top-level basketball career.
In addition, to understand how stringent and unreasonable the Fiba rule is, once you are 16, but have not applied for citizenship, one’s chances of ever playing for their motherland are up in smoke even if they got the passport at 17; at least that is how it appears to be, going by the way the Fiba rule is framed.
However, Fiba has gone ahead to allow teams like Uganda to naturalize players, as a way of going around the citizenship rule. A case in point, has been Ishmael Wainright, an American.
But a team is only allowed to have one naturalized player in its squad at any one time, or better still, for any tournament. But in Uganda’s case, they have in the past fielded players like John Balwigaire and Brandan Sebirumbi, born to Ugandan parents, as naturalized players, which has limited their activity for The Silverbacks.
The expectations in Uganda at the Afrobasket this time have never been lower, and Fiba has played a big part in it.