Police must deal firmly with hooliganism

AFC Leopards have been ordered to play behind closed doors in their remaining Kenya Premier League (KPL) matches after their fans were accused of causing havoc during their match against Sofapaka.

Sofapaka was, once again, at the centre of things last Sunday when they hosted Gor Mahia in a potential title decider in Machakos.

I will dwell on these two games, not because the scale of the resulting hooliganism was any different from previous ones but as a way of illustrating the paucity of ideas in dealing with football chaos by the concerned parties.

Sports hooliganism is not a Kenyan invention. Countries such as the United Kingdom, Belgium, the Netherlands, South Africa, Egypt, Brazil and Argentina have dealt with hooliganism with reasonable success by putting in place adequate measures to check it. 

In Kenya, it seems soccer administrators, clubs and other concerned parties wait for trouble to happen so that they can mete out retributive justice in the form of fines and bans.

HOW TO END HOOLIGANISM

For hooliganism to be brought under control, there must be deliberate efforts by the clubs, KPL, Football Kenya Federation, county governments and the police. In Europe, this has been done by profiling fans to the extent that anyone who causes trouble can be followed up individually and punished. This would help identify serial troublemakers.

Secondly, those countries that deal successfully with unruly fans have perfected the art of managing crowds. They study the trends and behaviour of mobs and also use sheer force of numbers. In high-risk matches, security personnel can literally outnumber the hooligans, their numbers intimidating potential troublemakers into submission.

In Machakos, there was no visible police presence and it should not be a surprise to any casual observer that the fans were able to cause the damage that they did.

COULD HAVE BEEN PREVENTED

The destruction could have been prevented. I was at both matches and my observation was that in spite of the significance of both matches and the attendant tensions and size of the crowd expected, the security organs were ill-prepared for any form of altercation.

There were no measures in place to ensure that the security of the stands was not breached. At one point in Machakos, fans threatened to spill over into the VIP area and the obviously ill-trained county security officials were no match for them.

A group of hooligans overwhelmed the security personnel at the gate and gained entry into the stadium, and still there was no enhanced security. 

Then the police officers, realising that they were hopelessly outnumbered by the unruly fans, started shooting tear gas into a relatively peaceful crowd. Better trained security personnel should have realised that this would be the spark needed to ignite an already volatile situation.

Ordering that matches be played behind closed doors could worsen the situation. Do our stadiums have the capacity to lock out fans? What is to prevent a situation where a stadium can come under siege by fans? The knee-jerk type of reactions that we see in the wake of such chaos can only sink football deeper into the abyss.

Mr Handa is a former Gor Mahia player and director of OH-Sport