inBUSINESS Issue 12

Now 39 but still fairly reserved inspite of
his ‘exploits’ and laudable achievements both
at home and in foreign climes, he speaks of
low points in his career when he often needed
“a heart double the size of a football” in order
to tackle the obstacles. Always a footballer,
much of his troubles have come from his
game of choice where there was pressure on
all sides - from the coach, teammates and fans
who always have high expectations of a player.
“Ambition, resilience, dedication and the
friends you keep will help you reach higher
levels because they are all gifted in different
ways and are thus able to support you.”
Dipsy - whose given name of Diphetogo
means change(s), began to harbour these
ambitions from the age of 10 – substantiating
his mother on this point. His first team
was Liverpool, taking its name from the
well-known English side, which was in the
Chappies Little League. At 15, he joined
another Chappies League team, Manchester,
its name also drawn from the English Premier
League. He was on the threshold to greater
things, joining Gaborone’s Nyangabgwe FC
before landing at Gaborone United in 1995.
He soon came across football sponsorship
on the Internet, prompting him to go to
the National Archives for material thus far
written about him for onward transmission to
the scholarship committee. That is how Dipsy
entered Harris-Stowe State College in what
had widely been expected to be a ‘cataclysmic’
year of 2000.
He was soon becoming quite peripatetic,
coming back to be with GU for two months,
then back in the US with Chicago Fire in
late 2002 where he stayed until he returned
to join Engen Santos in neighbouring South
Africa in 2005. His football career now on
a firm footing, Dipsy joined South Africa’s
Jomo Cosmos in 2008 for six months before
going to Ajax Cape Town and then triple
premiership champions Super Sport United
in fairly quick succession.
And although he made a good home at
Pretoria University in 2012 where he stayed
until his retirement in 2014, it was at Ajax
that he says he felt most at home because
there was a good mix of young and old in the
squad. “Being the older guy meant I had to
lead by example,” he says. With more than
50 caps for the Zebras, Dipsy is a veteran of
note who became the bedrock of the national
team in great part because of his international
exploits. “I was expected to do well,” he
confirms. “There was that kind of pressure on
me because I had to motivate for the entire
team.”
Dipsy was first fielded for his country’s
national team at the turn of the century to face
what was fast becoming Botswana’s nemesis,
South Africa’s Bafana Bafana, at the National
Stadium in Gaborone, scoring the sole Zebras
goal before the wild horses went down 2-1.
“The respectable margin was a statement that
we could grow bigger and play better,” he says
of the 1999 encounter.
Observers always puzzle over what
happened to Botswana football after the
Gleneagles Agreement on sporting contacts
with (apartheid) South Africa came into
force in 1977 to reinforce other international
instruments for the isolation of apartheid
South Africa as a polecat state. Prior to the
stinging sanctions, Botswana sides more
than held their own against the best of South
African clubs. Whatever it is that happened,
Botswana’s football decline to flaccid status
came under sharp relief when South Africa
joined the comity of nations after liberation
came to the former pariah state, routinely
losing at both club and national team level.
But a more serious ‘nemesis’ for footballers
can be injury. While living in former
US president Barrack Obama’s adopted
hometown of Chicago in 2002, Dipsy returned
to Gabs to organise an ‘All Kasi” Christmas
tournament at GSS Grounds with friends.
But as fate would have it, the buddy-buddy
tourney proved a personal disaster. He recalls:
“I played the game far from my employer and
broke my left ankle. Fortunately, my employer
was quite understanding and took care of my
rehab.”
Today Dipsy is at the threshold of an
entirely new chapter in his illustrious
career, albeit one shrouded in mystery and
reticence except to say it is about football
entrepreneurship in the form of a football
academy. “Some people think sports is a waste
of time,” says Dipsy, “but I believe we can
invest in football in terms of infrastructure,
programmes, personnel, time and money. We
can create wealth in an environment where
football is still a past time.”
Before we press him for details regarding
his next enterprise, inBusiness proposes a
toast to this titan who detested Botswana’s
reputation as minnows. Unlike Wiseman’s
ferocious velocity that often made men look
like dog food collected from a funeral, Dipsy’s
defining style had something of a dramatic
irony about it: an unrushed brilliance that
unexpectedly turned the most solid defence
into a lethargic movement sapped by lack
of conviction a measly nanosecond before
busting the net with a veritable cannon volley.
That is what Dipsy’s deliberation did for
early 21st Century GU and the country’s
top flight football. And although the glory is
the property mainly of the Zebras defence,
Dipsy and his cool were there when Botswana
achieved the unbeatable record of reaching
AFCON 2012 without a loss. Throughout
that unparalleled campaign, the equation was
made all the more deadly by the exceptional
go-getter role of Jerome Ramatlhakwane,
who was making his mark as the jewel of
Botswana’s football future.
But let no one be misled by the midfieldercum-striker’s
nickname. Dipsy is nowhere
near being a dipsomaniac, although he admits
to enjoying an occasional tipple or two. The
codename of Botswana’s best-known football
export is merely a play on his given name of
Diphetogo. Watch this space for changes that
he is about to bring to sports in Botswana,
especially football!
The Dipsy Re-run
We run “Dipsy Is No Dipsomaniac,” the inspiring
story of the talented footballer who has
hung his boots and is in the process of becoming
a businessman of notable innovation,
because there was a mistake that marred
reading flow in our last edition in which the
story first appeared.
TINT BOULEVARD
STOP
ORIENTED SERVICES
benmakhala@gmail.com
www.inbusiness.co.bw | Issue 12 | 2017 59