HaBaWaBa without Black Star Polo: bureaucracy beats sport, again
As in 2023, the team from Ghana failed to get entry visas for Italy and is forced to withdraw from the event in Lignano: "The Embassy didn't even meet us"
HaBaWaBa International Festival is a multicolor festival, a grand celebration of waterpolo and its noblest values that has been going on for 16 summers now. As in 2023, however, Waterpolo Development is forced to give a sad news to its little players and to all the people involved in the event: Black Star Polo, the U12 team belonging to the Ghana Water Polo project, had again to give up its participation in the HaBaWaBa International Festival. Ghanaian little players were unable to get entry visas for Italy from the Italian Embassy in Accra, just as happened a year ago.
“Last year the Embassy denied the visas on the day of our flight to Italy, this time they didn’t even give the kids and their parents an appointment despite the intervention of the Ghana Swimming Federation: no response, no communication”. Asante Sefa-Boakye, the Ghanaian-born US coach who started the Ghana Water Polo project, tells WPDWorld. “We had to give up. It’s a disappointing and painful situation, it seems there is not much we can do at this time. One day Black Star Polo will be in Lignano, that is for sure, but that day is not now”.
Waterpolo Development and the whole HaBaWaBa community feel great solidarity with Black Star Polo, Italian bureaucracy once again proved insurmountable for a group of kids who simply dreamed of participating in a major international sport event together with their peers coming from all over the world. They would have represented Sub-Saharan Africa for the first time at HaBaWaBa.
Once again, politics sets boundaries that sports should not know and the little ones pay the price. Surely Black Star Polo will not give up its dream of landing at HaBaWaBa and Waterpolo Development keep supporting their dream.
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