KENYAN FOOTBALL FAST GOING DOWN THE DRAIN!

From 1976 to 1989, Kenyan clubs won a total of 11 Confederation of East and Central African Football (CECAFA) Club titles, out of a possible 14! In 1989, Harambee Stars lost in the final of the All African Games football championship to Egypt, at a packed then Moi International Sports Centre (MISC) Kasarani! Our clubs ruled the region and our very own Harambee Stars matched the big boys of African football! Next between 1989 and 2014, Kenyan clubs won a paltry four CECAFA Club titles, out of a possible 25! Harambee Stars last played at the African Nations Cup in Tunisia, 2004. Since 2000, in lengthy 14 years, Harambee Stars have only managed to win the CECAFA Championship twice; in 2002 and last year, under the now fired, Adel Amrouche. We have never even qualified for the African Nations Cup meant for African players who are based in the African  leagues, better known as the CHAN Championship despite gloating about how high-flying the local football has been! This year, Gor Mahia, our representatives to the regional club championship in Kigali, Rwanda, miserable bowed out in the group matches, with only two draws, at the bottom of their group. Closely examine these facts and figures, and draw a compass of the direction our football has taken, and let me give you mine.

Going by the mediocre performances of our clubs and Harambee Stars in both continental and regional championships, our football has fast sunk and surely going down into oblivion. The eerie and frenzy that characterizes the local action has amounted to nothing, whenever we move out of our borders. Our clubs and very own Harambee Stars have somehow turned into the whipping boys! Global sports broadcaster, SuperSport has pumped money into our clubs and offers live coverage of the action. Regional beer manufacturing giant, East African Breweries Limited (EABL Ltd) has sponsored the league to a tidy sum and the incentives for the winners have only gotten better! The fans have stated streaming back into our stadia and sanity is back too.

But we have fundamental issues that must be addressed, lest we risk losing it all in football. The government’s policies about sports are wanting. This is not only about the Jubilee Coalition, No; it is about successive regimes since independence. Our football administrators politic more than they engage in management and running of the sport, and thus, corruption, nepotism, mismanagement and all sorts of evil characterize the beautiful game in Kenya. For the near-religious following that football demands, individuals in Kenya have used it to climb the political ladder. You remember, Kenneth Matiba and Ezra Sambu? For these two, football and politics were Siamese twins! The game played a key role in their rise up the political ladder. The trade of fusing politics and football in the country runs deep, and the perfect scenario is whenever we near the electioneering period. It is the game that most politicians use to bring the youth together and consolidate the vote, but after that, it is a painful wait of five years!!!

We have talent in the country, but we must wake up and match our regional and continental opponents as they improve the management and administration of the beautiful game. If we do not, too bad; Kenyan football will plunder into even deep misery and sink into the arms of football oblivion! We are already walking that path!

FOOTBALL MANAGEMENT AND ADMINISTRATION IS THE PROBLEM, NOT HARAMBEE STARS

Harambee Stars proved to be another football debacle when they failed to beat Lesotho at the Nyayo National Stadium, on 2 August! A 1-0 aggregate loss tossed them out of the running for a ticket to next year’s African Nations Cup in Morocco. What followed was equally catastrophic! Football Kenya Federation, FKF, disbanded the entire team and sacked the Adel Amorouche-led technical bench, and replaced it with outgoing Gor Mahia coach, Bobby Wiliamson, assisted by former skipper,Musa Otieno and another former Stars man, Simeon Mulama as the team manager. But wait a minute; this is just another disaster brewing in the pot!

It is no rocket science that football structures, to develop players and nature talent from the young age, are lacking. We have no properly structured under-age leagues and structures upon which to identify talent and nature it progressively through the Under 12, Undeer-15, Under-17 and Under 23, before ushering them into the senior team. All we have are haphazardly arranged tem and under age championships. The Kenya Premier League Limited, KPL, tried to organize an Under-19 Kenya Premier league, with the teams drawn from the 16 clubs in the top flight, a plan that worked for two seasons before it fizzled out and got lost in the air. The Copa Coca Cola championship perhaps comes close to replacing it and with the ample sponsorship from the soft drink giant manufacturer; the tourney gives us a glimpse of the oozing football talent in the country. However, do we really know where the stars of this annual championship disappear into? Remember, the once prolific, Emmanuel Tostao who lit the 2009 Copa Coca Cola edition and went on to match some of Africa’s best in the African Copa Coca Cola championship the same year in South Africa? What happened to this talent that that poised to replace the aging Dennis Oliech in the national team jersey? Years later, we heard of him in the Ingw’e camp, but that is how far the story goes. The truth is that in Tostao, we missed the chance to get the next Oliech!

As a federation, FKF should ask te tough questions and see how many Tostao’s we have lost due to the outrightly incapable management and administration of the beautiful game. The federation has failed us. We have no age-group structures to develop the talent from its tender age. Our County, Provincial and Nationwide leagues do not offer much hope and optimism. Talents emerge during the annual secondary school football championships, but if Thika United does not absorb them and nature them, then the talent vanishes into thin air and gets eaten away playing the mtaani leagues!

As it stands now, the Williamson-led technical bench will at a point find itself in an awkward position as Amourouche did, and may not even rule the region by winning the Confederation of Eastern and Central (CECAFA) championship, as Amourouche did in Nairobi, last year. When that tragedy happens again, disbanding Harambee Stars will not be the solution; it will instead be the irrational and carelessly thought continuation of a debacle.

Let us invest in structures and nature talent, both tactically and technically from its tender age. This is how the likes of Nigeria, Ghana, Cameroun Cote D’Ivoire and Algeria have ruled Africa, won the global under-age stages and exported world beating talents to Europe! They did not heat up their heads trying to treat the symptoms, as our local football federation does!

GOR MAHIA IN NEAR MISSION IMPOSSIBLE IN RWANDA!

After two disappointing losses in the Confederation of Eastern and Central Club (CECAFA) championship in Rwanda, Gor Mahia, fondly referred to as K’Ogallo stare at elimination in the face, pointless and winless after two games! An opening loss to Uganda’s Kampala City Council Authority (KCCA), despite going ahead in the first half and Monday’s 1-0 loss to Burundi’s Atletico, have  put the Kenyan representatives in the awkward situation of must win! Worse still, they come up with Rwanda’s APR, the team that drubbed them 5-0 in the 2009 African Champions League in Nairobi! History may not have a place when the ball rolls out onto the field, but with all due respect, Gor’s mediocre performances in the competition inspire little hope and gets even worse, now that they are to face a team that humiliated them on home soil!

On paper, the only game that they stand to win is against Djibouti’s Telecom, a team that came into the championship as the group’s whipping boys. However, they upset the form book by edging out KCCA 2-1, and now stand a better chance of advancing, than our Gor Mahia! Bobby Williamson’s charges failed to pick themselves up from the first match loss, and went on to lose the second match to Burundi’s Atletico, despite dominating large periods of the game, and saw an ever reliable Dan Sserunkuma squander an open chance before Atletico, netted the solitary goal. 

The next two matches are must wins for Gor Mahia. They must avoid defeat and get a draw and a win at the very worst, and cross their fingers that other results go their way. However winning the two games and comprehensively so with a healthy goal aggregate is the best option to live longer in the championship. If Gor find it hard against Rwanda’s APR and Djibouti’s Telecom, then they should not be disappointed. They plotted their downfall by failing to win in any of the two opening matches. Fate and footballing gods have not conspired to eliminate them, but the players have. 

However, if they summon their energies and register wins in the last two matches, then it will be a welcome relief to Kenyan football fans, who have gone for seven years without seeing a local club rule the region. The last time was in 2008 when Tusker Fc under the tutelage of Jacob ‘Ghost’ Mulee lifted the CECAFA Club championship in Dar, Tanzania.

K’Ogallo may progress past the group with two wins, but going by their mediocre and pedestrian performances in the matches against KCCA and Atletico, they may not live long in the championship!

DEVOLUTION IS GREAT AN IDEA, BUT THE CHALLENGES MUST BE ADDRESSED.

On August 27 2010, at a packed Uhuru Park, Nairobi, former President Kibaki led the nation in ushering in the new constitution. A cool breeze of optimism and renewal blew across Kenya, as we al celebrated a milestone. But perhaps the greatest gift that the new constitutional order presented to the country was devolution.

With the decentralization of power from Nairobi to all the newly formed 47 Counties, all Kenyans, especially in the marginalized areas had a reason to smile. At last, financial power had been brought home and they could charter their good cause forward. They could no longer bemoan the ineptitude of disregard that the central government had pushed them into, in the division of the national cake. With duly elected governors sitting pretty in office, Kenya has a chance to develop herself, nip marginalization and make sure that Vision 2030 comes closer to fruition! We all have a chance to build roads, improve health sector, enhance the provision and quality of education and make sure that all Kenyans live a better life.

The governor, his cabinet and the Members of the county assembly are the drivers of the development agenda in our counties. Proper legislation and formulation of policies, coupled with the conducive political environment are what all counties need to better the lives of her people. Dr Alfred Mutua, the Machakos County Governor has set the bar for the other 46 to follow. Roads have been built, health sector bolstered by the provision of ambulances in all wards, security has been taken a notch higher by the police cars that have been bought, and as one travels along the Makutano Junction-Machakos Town road, off the Nairobi-Mombasa Highway, the tarmac is well lit and police cars and ambulances are a scene all too common. Now this is development and Kenyans down in the County of Machakos can attest to this, as they bask under the sun of the People’s Park! Only if the other counties can emulate the pioneer county; Machakos County!

Sadly, devolution has faced threats from the very people entrusted to steer it ahead. Members of County assemblies have splashed public money in overseas trip, done under the pretext of going to learn more on development. Yet wit Internet, the world has become a global village, we can all learn from there! Must our MCAs go abroad and experience the taste of quality life so as to come and develop our counties? Is that the only way to develop? No, it is not. My crystal ball tells me that it is just the poor mind that as African, once in power, we must grow our stomachs and plunder the public coffers at all costs! A lot of money has been lost in these learning trips abroad, yet our roads are filled with pot-holes, hospitals are run down and lack enough personnel and drug supplies, our schools are fast growing old and problems afflict us day in day out! Is it not the height of stupidity that our MCA’s pretend not to know the solutions to these?

As MCA’s plunder and waste public money in these trips, misappropriation of funds meant for development, corruption, nepotism and the big man syndrome are some of the ills that have been devolved from the central government to the county governments. Our governors have mooted the idea of a referendum to increase funds to their governments, yet issues of misappropriation and misuse of already allocated funds have blatantly been ignored. It is ridiculous to agitate for more funds yet most of these counties have not once, but severally returned money to the exchequer after failing to put it all into development. Talk of chewing more than you can chew!

Devolution can work. It is the answer to developing Kenya and improving the lives of all Kenyans. It is the cure to the marginalization that the people of Northern Kenya faced since 1963! A governor from the region was recently quoted by the media saying that the budgetary allocation that his county had received in a single financial year is more that the total that the region had received since independence! However, there are issues that must be addressed and urgently so.

Governor Mutua has already shown that with clear objectives, and a supportive county assembly and government, that devolution is the answer to developing Kenya. Machakos is the county of destination, as other counties fight a myriad of homegrown troubles that threaten development at their backyards! 

Otherwise, as Machakos County overcomes the challenges to surge ahead and improve the lives of her people, other counties might be impoverishing the lives of their people!

KENYA MON PAYS

Kenya Mon Pays

Maison De La Grande Cinq

Maison De la Champions d’Athletisme

Kenya Mon Pays

Pays Le Majeste

Kenya Mon Pays

Situe Dans l’Afrique Orientale

Le Geant De la Region

Vraiment Le Majeste

Kenya Mon Pays

Pays Le Majeste

Kenya Mon Pays

Mere De Wangari Mathai

Le Champion Pour l’Environment

Mere De David Rudisha

Le Roi De la Piste Athletisme

Mere De Julius Yego

Le Maitre De Javelin

Mere De Freres Wanyama

Mere De Dennis Oliech

Kenya Mon Pays

Pays le Majeste!