As Township Rollers lodge a formal complaint against Mochudi Centre Chiefs
The oldest rivalry in Botswana football has acquired an improbable new weapon: the drone.
Two days before Mochudi Centre Chiefs and Township Rollers are due to collide in one of the season’s most consequential fixtures, their long-simmering enmity has veered off the pitch and into the airspace above it, with the two heavyweights now entangled in a dispute over an alleged act of aerial surveillance.
WeekendSport can exclusively reveal that Township Rollers – the club affectionately known as Mapalastina – has lodged a formal complaint with the acting chief executive officer of the Botswana Football League (BFL), accusing its archrival of flying an unauthorised drone over a closed training session at the Lekidi Football Centre on Thursday morning.
According to the complaint addressed to the acting BFL chief executive, the device appeared between 08h00 and 09h00, rising from the direction of the Centre Chiefs training area and hovering over the Rollers camp as the club rehearsed its tactical plans for Saturday’s encounter. The team’s technical staff and security personnel, the complaint says, intercepted the drone before it could complete its reconnaissance.
In the club’s telling, this was no idle curiosity but an incursion with competitive consequences. Rollers contends that the episode compromised its preparations and raises uncomfortable questions about sporting integrity, the rules governing a facility it shares with its rival, and the aviation regulations that dictate when and where drones may legally fly. The club has asked the BFL to open an urgent investigation, to bar Centre Chiefs from using any footage the drone may have captured, and to impose what it calls appropriate sanctions for unsportsmanlike conduct.
A confrontation at the fence
The quarrel did not remain confined to paperwork. It boiled over at the training ground itself, where video footage now circulating shows the Rollers security officer, Motlatsi Montsi, pressed against the perimeter fence of the Centre Chiefs training area, confronting Chiefs officials and security staff over the drone’s presence. The exchange is visibly tense; at one point Montsi is seen jabbing a finger toward a Centre Chiefs security official — an image that has only sharpened the sense of theatre surrounding a match that scarcely needed more of it.
Rollers’ public relations officer, Kaizer Sekaba, has confirmed that the club escalated the matter to both the Botswana Football Association (BFA) and the BFL. Speaking on a local radio station on Thursday, Sekaba made little effort to disguise his dismay.
They took photos of us using drones. It hurt me so much because I come from CAF and FIFA. I know these things, these are the things I used to advise teams on. Seeing these things coming into our football now hurts me.
He went further, questioning why the device had been trained on Rollers at all.
Even though they had the change (money) to buy drones, they were not supposed to test them on us. We have been in football before them.
Rules of the game – and of the skies
The complaint rests on more than wounded pride. Rollers cites Article 25 of the BFA Play Rules, the provision dealing with conduct capable of bringing the game into disrepute, and invokes both the regulations governing the shared Lekidi facility and the drone requirements set by the Civil Aviation Authority of Botswana (CAAB). Should footage of its closed session have been captured, the club argues, its tactical preparations may have been laid bare to the very opponent it is about to face.
Mochudi Centre Chiefs, for their part, had offered no public account by press time – neither answering the allegations nor explaining the circumstances under which a drone came to be airborne above the venue.
For now, the drama shifts from the training pitch to the offices of the football authorities. With the BFL asked to investigate, it falls to the game’s administrators to establish the facts that matter most: who operated the drone, whether the flight was authorised, and whether any rules – of the sport, the facility, or the skies – were broken. The answers may arrive after Saturday’s whistle. The suspicion, however, has already taken flight.
