How football affects democracy and causes high fertility rates too

Gor Mahia officials say they are going to punish the club’s fans who were behind the violence that prematurely ended last Saturday’s Kenya Premier League match against Rangers FC.

The thing with football hooliganism is that, especially in countries like ours, it is a bigger issue than bad manners.

Secondly, football has grown into such a big human phenomenon, it is no longer just the beautiful game.

We hear a lot about the “role of sports in development”.

Thus football gave poor children in Mathare a chance to form one of the most exciting youth football clubs in Africa; to play on the global stage; and to make a living.

However, the real value of sports is that it teaches us several critical values for a modern society. First, it hones our competitive drive and the need to win.

Second, it teaches courage: It takes a lot of stomach to play in the World Cup knowing that over a billion people in the world are watching you – and that if you make a fool of yourself, two billion eyes will see it.

Thirdly, sports is a low-cost way of teaching us to accept defeat.

Therefore, on the whole, sports-loving presidents have a better temperament than those who are not big on any game.

President Mwai Kibaki probably developed his laid back ways on the golf course. Prime Minister Odinga, a football fanatic, got his seeming thick skin from watching his favourite teams lose.

Former President Moi, on the other hand, was not a big sports fan. Of the three, he is the more mercurial.

The great Nelson Mandela, the only African president to walk away from the fat job after one term, learnt his humility from being floored in the boxing ring.

Not too far from Mandela in calmness is the vegetarian former Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda.

Kaunda always carried an immaculate white handkerchief, and cried into it more times than any other leader has done publicly. Kaunda played golf.

Of course, Uganda’s military dictator Idi Amin was also a sportsman. But his approach to sports was clear evidence that he was a terrible man.

He never wanted to lose. He would enter a motor rally and all other drivers would park on the roadside to allow him to pass and win.

When he played basketball, he would be left to make a shot 10 times until he got lucky, without any challenge. He liked to swim too, but could never do so in a straight line.

Therefore, people who cannot accept the defeat of their football team cannot easily accept the defeat of their candidate in an election. The fellows working on Kenya’s 2012 elections should watch football as part of their risk assessment exercise.

The other thing is that football has become an even more masculine and testosterone-fuelled sport. When it became a big TV affair, several things happened.

Women, especially, who were not great fans or were afraid of violence and therefore didn’t go to stadiums, could now watch it.

Hormones entered the picture. There was a new option to watching the game, not for the skill of the players, but because there were 22 hunks running around for 90 minutes.

The players themselves became more dramatic, and started doing things that were unheard of in the good old days – throwing off their shirts in celebration when they scored. As a result, they could not have potbellies.

They all became extra-masculine by developing six packs! Football became a virility sport for the men, and for the women it became a fertility sport.

The New Scientist tells us that curvaceous women tend to be “more fertile”. Watch Premier League, Spain’s La Liga, Brazilian or Argentinian leagues, or go to Nyayo Stadium or the National Stadium in Dar es Salaam for a major football game.

It is mostly curvaceous women who watch the game. Pencil-thin women rarely watch football. For demographers, then, the level of women’s interest in football is crudely indicative of a nation’s reproductive potential.

With so many our of women flocking to football stadiums. Mother Africa had better prepare to feed very many mouths in the years to come.

cobbo@ke.nationmedia.com