He highlighted that their non- affiliation to BNSC is a disadvantage as they cannot compete internationally. The association recently elected a new committee. "We have put together a strong proposal which I believe will be accepted. Affiliating to BNSC can help us a great deal because we would be able to attract sponsorship as we would have a place where people can find us," Mokhuchedi said.
He noted that the executive committee could not submit an application during the BNSC Annual General Meeting (AGM) in March this year because BODANSA had planned its own AGM two months later. Mokhuchedi said BODANSA has enough affiliates to guarantee affiliation to BNSC. He said that last month, they had over 100 couples at the Francistown Dance Sport competition.
"We have quite a good number of affiliates. Although some of the couples which took part at the Francistown competition last month were from South Africa and Swaziland, we also had a great number of locals and I can tell you more and more people are interested," he said. For a long time, dance sport popularly known as ballroom dance has remained in oblivion as people associated it with all sorts of bad things. It was only in recent years that it got recognition as an Olympic sport.
"Dance sport is expensive because it is a classy sport, the clothes that couples wear are expensive and preparation for competitions costs a lot of resources and we have been using our resources and we believe it is time we got some help from BNSC like other codes," Mokhuchedi said. He revealed that BODANSA is currently working with associations from Lesotho and Swaziland on the possibility of starting a three-nation dance competition. "We are pushing on this issue and we are hopeful it will go through and if we succeed, then we would make it an annual event rotating between the three countries," he said.
