Hooliganism won’t go away anytime soon

In the late seventies I witnessed a match between Gor Mahia and Feisal FC at Mombasa Municipal Stadium.

Feisal was leading 1-0 towards the end of regulation time and Gor was piling up the pressure. The stadium was tense and just then, the ball went out of play for a Gor Mahia throw in. They had no ball boys then and there was only one match ball.

The great Ouma Chege ran out of the pitch to fetch the ball for a quick throw-in but a little boy from the main stand got the ball before him and took off with it. Feisal fans cheered the kid while to the chagrin of K’Ogalo fans.

Ouma Chege landed a heavy flying kick on the boy’s back and he fell flat on the ground. The big man took the ball but what followed next was bedlam.

That was the first match I remember when I witnessed hooliganism and understood just how ugly and bloody it can get; with sling shots zinging by your ears not to mention the fear of a stampede.

I was a small kid then and many years later I have seen more of such incidents. Every time I’m in the stadium, I always ready for such eventualities.

On Saturday 22 September 2012, football referee Martin Shikuku Wekesa was seriously injured in a match between coastal arch rivals Sparki Youth and Admiral at Tudor Day grounds. The match was abandoned two minutes to the end of regulation time after some hoodlums stormed the pitch and assaulted the referee just as he was about to flash a red card to a Sparki player.

Former Sparki Youth assistant coach Dudi Kajembe Rasta was arrested as a key suspect and charged at the Mombasa Law Court for causing grievous bodily harm to Wekesa but was acquitted for lack of credible evidence after 18 months trial.

Kajembe was arrested on Wednesday 9 January 2013 by the Changamwe Police at his residence in Bangladesh and  held in custody at Makupa Police Station before being charged in court the following day where he was released on a cash bail of Sh 200 000. A full three month period had elapsed before the suspect was arrested!

In fact he was arrested just after the hospital confirmed that the harm upon the referee was of ‘grave consequences’.

 I shall skip the kind of injuries that this referee sustained since they may be traumatic to our polite readers. What I would like to point out is that no lessons have been learnt from this unfortunate incident.

We may argue that sports hooliganism is rife all over the world and we can cite numerous cases where people died as a result of a stampede in a stadium to prove the point.

But you will realize that here in Kenya most of the times we indulge in hooliganism for no reason at all! We have taken the vice a notch higher and trivialised it in typical Kenyan fashion. Often it is a waste of time trying to find the cause of the mayhem - you will only end up getting lost in the trail.

RECENT SCENE

A case in point is the AFC Leopards versus Muhoroni Youth match last Wednesday which ended scoreless.

Fights broke out before, during and after the match. Ingwe officials themselves were very eager to do something silly and since this is the only duty they take seriously they surpassed even the fans in stupidity!

During the match, we witnessed the latest innovation in ruffianism- the use of salt for assault.

Muhoroni players had salt thrown upon them and some complained that their eyes were the targets of this compound. In the ensuing melee, the police arrested two female Ingwe fans presumably because they could not run as fast as the seasoned male hooligans and perhaps they were in skirts which are not congenial to sprinting.

It so happens that the salt was not meant for the eyes of the opposition; the superstitious believe that the ingredient sterilises any juju Muhoroni may have carried with them. Be as it may, we must chide them for adding salt the malignant wound that is hooliganism!