When I think about local football in Kenya, I remember a song we used to sing many years ago when were kids. It went mjinga alijenga mchangani na mwerevu alijenga mwambani. In other words, the song says that the wise man built his house on the rock while the fool built his house on sand and when the storm came his house fell with a thud!! That, unfortunately, is how football is being run in this country.
We are running football in a jua-kali manner and no wonder we are not moving anywhere. We are just running around in circles like a dog running after its tail. It can never catch its tail. Instead, it will die trying. You do not to be genius to understand that if you want to build a strong, multi-storeyed house, you need to lay down a very strong foundation for the structure. You can only do that by digging deep and putting in place material that will carry the weight of the structure and enable it to stand. We need a deep foundation in the running of football in this country. We will only lay this strong foundation by starting to build football from the grassroots and then moving upwards.
But today, many in the football fraternity are fixated with the national team, forgetting that the national team has no players of its own. Players come from the grassroots where football is played and where we need a strong foundation. Running football jua kali-style means that we are doing things in an ad hoc manner. That is why we are paying dearly when it comes to international and regional tournaments.
Just the other day, the senior national team Harambee Stars was beaten 2-1 by Sudan in the LG international friendly tournament and then the under-23 team was drubbed by Uganda 5-1. Football Kenya Limited them announced that the under-23 team will not honour the return match in Uganda, not withstanding the possibility of sanctions by the Confederation of African Football (CAF). This is the kind of casual running of football that I am talking about. Even if the team was beaten in Nairobi, with dedication and better preparation, it was till possible to turn tables on the Ugandans in their own country. It has happened previously and it could happen again if only we had a football administration in this country that knows why it was elected. But they gave up even before trying. Are these the kind of people we want to run football in this country? Definitely no!
Now that Harambee Stars have nearly been bundled out of contention for the upcoming Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers, football lovers need to bring back football back to its former glory. With the coming elections in August, the delegates who will be charged with electing the new team to run football in the country need to bring into office men and women who have football at heart, and not those who are using football as a conduit to go into politics. Past history can bear me out that many former officials used the sport as a stepping stone into politics and once they went there, they forget all about football – Kenneth Matiba, the late Job Omino, Clement Gachanja, Peter Kenneth and many others. Some like Maina Kariuki, Sam Nyamweya and Sammy Kasuve have not been lucky with elective politics.
Should such people be allowed to run for positions in the forthcoming football elections or should the government or the body charged by FIFA to oversee the elections find a way of kicking them out? But it seems like it is too late now to deal with them in that manner since they will run to court and say that their constitutional rights of assembly and association have been flouted. Therefore, the only way to deal with such double-minded people is for the delegates to sieve them out so that they will go where their hearts are, in politics.
The way things are today in the country, even if we brought in ‘the saviour’ Jose Mourinho to be the coach of the national team, we will not get anywhere. With the kind of management that we have, we still have a long way to go. We need to give the running of football to people who have a heart for football and not politicians masquerading as football administrators. This is an industry with the capability of employing thousands of young people and growing our economy. But it is being messed up by political masqueraders.
It is heartening to see people who have been known to support football coming forward to run for different offices in the forthcoming elections. It is now up to the delegates to rise up to the occasion and give Kenyans the right football administrators, who will return Kenya back to the glory days of the 80s when Kenya was a powerhouse in football in the region.
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