Entrepreneurial skills needed in sport - Jacobs Director of Sport conquers with businessman''s ideas Businessman Lazarus Jacobs has shared ideas of how sport codes in the country can generate income and keep their activities running. As sport codes continue to cry about lack of funding, the national broadcaster invited local businessman Lazarus Jacobs to their weekly sport show last week to speak about sport funding from a business perspective.Jacobs started off by saying all hope is not lost in sports although there is a need for Namibians to have a paradigm shift in their thinking about the financial side of sports.
He emphasised the need to have people with business skills in sport structures who will work on how a sport code can derive funds and from where.
“We need to start getting entrepreneurial skills in many of these sports administrators so that you can have people that are just responsible for how they can generate income for that sport code,” he said.
He stressed that there is a need to even have someone with an MBA and “can look at this thing as a business and say where we are going to make most of our money so we need to look at this thing as Sports Pty Limited.”
He further stressed that there is a need to properly populate things when it comes to business within sport codes.
Jacobs however said before all that is done there is need for sport codes to clean their houses, especially when seeking a sponsor.
He indicated that when a company is going to sponsor a sport code, they need to find out about the product they are going to sponsor.
“The company needs to find out about what is this product that I am going to sponsor and secondly is when someone is going to invest money they want to know if the administrators are transparent.
“Issues of not having audited financial reports do not help matters at all so in order for you to draw in money, you need to clean up your house first and once your things are in order then the sponsors will come in,” he said.
The director of sports, Sivhute Katamba, concurred with the ideas shared by Jacobs, stating that “we do have the corporate world that can support us because Jacobs''s ideas are those that we can put in place and start implementing and help the funding of sport going on.”
Katamba said there is also a need for Namibians to be honest with themselves, “as to what do we want to do”.
“Namibia is our country and what I am seeing is as if we are still colonised because I can''t believe that as a person that have fought for the struggle and I go outside and say we are building a stadium for you and it looks like one built by a coloniser, it does not make sense.
“When we build a stadium let us do so with pride and that we are giving it to our people, so we are pleading with the lawmakers to see this as a serious situation and let us give our people what they deserve,” he said.
KAINO NGHITONGO