The Kenyans I know are not doping cheats

What you need to know:

  • But to paint our athletes as chronic dopers is to desecrate the shrine.
  • I have it on good authority that Maj. (rtd) Mike Rotich, now recalled home, was the wrong man for an onerous job.
  • He is a man who talks when he should be silent.
  • I have never had to discuss the probability that Kenyan athletes are cheats.

I am distressed about the direction this doping problem has taken. This should never have been a Kenyan problem. We run on ugali and our every next man has won the steeplechase since 1968.

We don’t need medicine to win the marathon or the cross country or any other distance race. Naftali Temu, our first Olympic gold medallist, must be turning in his grave as he reads these poisonous stories doubting the integrity of his successors.

I am resigned to our debilitating tribalism, corruption and widespread incompetence in the management of public affairs. But to paint our athletes as chronic dopers is to desecrate the shrine. Where are we supposed to turn to when the destruction is complete?

As I said in a previous column, our problem is not those who wish us ill. Our problem is ourselves. We are weak in the face of a foreign assault, however inept it is. It is enough that it is foreign.

We are like Chinua Achebe’s Umuofia society that was so riddled with internal contradictions and injustices that the incoming coloniser was just going to have a walk in the park taking it over.

I have it on good authority that Maj. (rtd) Mike Rotich, now recalled home, was the wrong man for an onerous job. My source, who knows him well, is unimpeachable. Here is a brief character appraisal of Rotich. He is a man who talks when he should be silent. He also talks way too much, including to people that he barely knows. And he purports to know more than he does.

NATIONAL DISASTERS

If you put these characteristics together, you can understand why he would make a good candidate for entrapment by anybody on a mission.

Yet he is just another poster boy of the national disasters that we wilfully invite upon ourselves. How does a country that rightfully considers itself an athletics superpower have such a man as its team manager?

What are the imminent qualities that he brings to the table? Have you ever heard of Mike Rotich as an athlete? Have you ever heard his name in a roster of top managers in Kenya?

And does a person need a PhD in aerospace engineering to ensure that his world champion javelin thrower has a plane ticket in good time for the Olympic Games? Maybe Mike Rotich does.

Anyway, let’s just remind ourselves that of the boxes to check when recruiting a candidate for a job in Kenya, the most critical is usually your surname. Fail that and you are down the tubes.

In decades doing what I do, I have been to many places and met many foreigners. But I have never had to discuss the probability that Kenyan athletes are cheats. This is a new one – and I am having to do it with depressing regularity. I don’t know how we have come to this.

Addressing the message of hatred and bigotry propagated by Donald Trump and which has gained traction with millions of Americans, President Barrack Obama said: “This is not the America that I know.”

I could say exactly the same thing about Kenyan athletes as doping cheats: “This is not the Kenya that I know.”