PiE SPORTS DESK
It has taken Pitso Mosimane barely a week since being unveiled as Bafana Bafana head coach to tick off one of the biggest boxes on his to-do list.
On Tuesday, SAFA and the Botswana Football Association jointly confirmed that Morena Ramoreboli will step away from his post as head coach of Botswana’s Zebras to become Mosimane’s assistant, completing the core of Bafana’s new technical team just weeks before the start of the 2027 Africa Cup of Nations qualifying campaign.
For South African football followers who haven’t kept close tabs on the regional game, a quick introduction is in order.
Ramoreboli, in his mid-forties, built his coaching reputation at home before crossing the border into Botswana, where he took charge of Premier League side Jwaneng Galaxy and picked up two league titles. That club form was the platform for his move into international management: he first took the Zebras job on an interim basis during a qualifying campaign and, remarkably, steered the country to only its second-ever Africa Cup of Nations appearance and its first in well over a decade.
That achievement was enough to convince the BFA to hand him the job permanently in January 2025, a post he held onto until this week’s move. He also has previous history with Bafana itself, having served the national team in an interim coaching capacity in the past — so this isn’t entirely unfamiliar territory for him.
Where he fits into Mosimane’s plans
Mosimane didn’t come into this job as a blank slate technically. He had already retained his long-time lieutenants Kabelo Rangoaga (fitness coach) and Musi Matlaba (performance analyst), but had been explicit that a further assistant coach position remained open after Helman Mkhalele was not kept on — Mosimane has been candid that he prefers to work with people he trusts inside his own circle. That made the search for the missing piece all the more important, and it explains why the appointment has been handled with some urgency, arriving just ahead of Bafana’s qualifiers against Guinea and Eritrea later this month.
Ramoreboli slots into that structure as the coach with the most recent, and most relevant, international head-coaching experience on the staff. Where Rangoaga and Matlaba cover conditioning and analysis, Ramoreboli brings a very specific and current skill set: someone who has just finished sitting in the technical area as a national-team head coach in this same qualifying environment, working with limited preparation time, tight camps and the pressure of representing a country on the continental stage.
The case for optimism
There’s a reasonably strong argument that this is a good, low-risk, high-upside appointment for Mosimane, for a few reasons:
- Proven upward trajectory. Ramoreboli didn’t inherit a ready-made Botswana side — he built towards their AFCON qualification from an interim role, which speaks to man-management and the ability to get a squad playing above expectations rather than simply riding a talented group.
- Regional and tactical know-how. SAFA’s own framing of the move points to his tactical adaptability and understanding of football in the wider region — useful currency in a qualifying group where familiarity with opponents’ styles can be the difference in tight matches.
- A track record of developing players. Beyond results, he’s been credited with improving individual players and building competitive squads from modest resources, which is exactly the kind of deputy a head coach wants when squad depth is a genuine concern for Bafana.
- Minimal integration risk. He already knows South African football and, having previously worked with Bafana in an interim role, isn’t walking into a completely foreign environment. That should shorten the settling-in period Mosimane can ill afford given the qualifiers are only weeks away.
None of this guarantees success — assistant coaching appointments are notoriously hard to judge from the outside, and chemistry with Mosimane’s own methods will only be tested once camp begins. There’s also the obvious question of whether managing a small qualifying campaign with Botswana translates smoothly to the bigger stage, bigger egos and heavier scrutiny that come with the Bafana job. But on paper, between the credentials, the timing and the gap he fills in Mosimane’s technical team, this reads as a sensible, low-drama appointment rather than a gamble.
Mosimane’s technical team is not quite complete — a goalkeeper coach position remains vacant following Grant Johnson’s departure — but with Rangoaga, Matlaba and now Ramoreboli in place, the head coach has the bulk of his backroom staff sorted with just enough time to prepare for Guinea and Eritrea.
