Scourge of broken promises casts shadow on shining Kenyan sports

To be a member of a Kenya sports team in this era is to live an orphan’s life under abusive guardians.

The wings of mother hen under which you flourished finally folded, you are now exposed to the harshness of jungle life where deceit, irresponsibility and downright cruelty are character markers of the successful person and are worn publicly as a badge of honour.

When it is not stealing money meant for kit, it is withholding salaries and allowances. When it is not allowing girls flying the national flag to be held hostage in a foreign capital over unpaid hotel bills, it is callously disregarding promises made to members of the national football team for qualifying for this June’s Africa Cup of Nations.

When it is not telling lies about when stadiums under renovation will be ready for use, it is dumping semi-illiterate street toughs at the apex of the sports ministry. And when it is not recycling old mistakes, it is displaying breathtaking incompetence when making new ones.

Let us drop any pretence and accept that we live in a moral and ethical desert. Our God of all creation is money which is to be obtained by any means necessary, starting with robbing the people entrusted to you. No line of our national anthem has been as mocked by our new ethos as the one that says “service be our earnest endeavour.” Service? Which service? The guiding question in our every endeavour is: “What’s in it for me?”

The Kenya Prisons Service’ women's volleyball team has won the Africa Club Volleyball title five times — a stupendous achievement. But last week, they were prisoners in a hotel named Al-Albilla in Cairo where they were participating in the same competition.

Because they could not pay their bills, hotel management confiscated their passports, effectively demobilising them. Worse, the girls were out of pocket, not having been paid their allowances. To contemplate the stress they were under is to endure it yourself.

Who does this kind of thing to the best your country can raise? Is there no floor below which Kenya’s sports managerial mediocrity can fall?

But if you thought that is as bad as it can get, wait till you read the statement released by their boss, Zeinab Hussein, the Principal Secretary in the State Department for Correctional Services. You need to keep going back to the statement to assure yourself that you haven’t made a mistake. It beggars belief.

The PS told Kenyans: “Our attention has been drawn to media articles reporting that the Kenya Prisons Service women’s volleyball team is in distress in Cairo, Egypt. The State Department for Correctional Services neither cleared nor financed the team’s travel to Cairo and was surprised to learn of its presence outside the country. Given the breach of protocol and the contravention of rules regarding public servants’ travel overseas, the government has immediately organised for their repatriation tonight.

“Whilst the government acknowledges and supports sports as one of the many sources of our national pride, we regret this turn of events, which has caused the people of Kenya undue embarrassment.”

'TWO WAYS'

There are only two ways to react to this statement. One is to believe it and the other is to doubt it. Both leave you not knowing which of the two is worse.

Let us take Ms Hussein at her word. This would mean that the government was soundly asleep when staff members of its prisons department, in a nefarious scheme, bested the country’s immigration system and smoothed their way past all checks at Jomo Kenyatta International Airport.

After landing in Cairo, they did the same to unsuspecting Egyptian authorities before booking themselves in a downtown hotel and starting to play in the continental competition in front of the world’s cameras. Why they decided to act like this is known only to themselves.

But, fortunately, the good government of Kenya came to after being stirred by stories appearing in the pages of Nation Sport. That is when it acted with alacrity to bring them home where they belong.

If all this is true, then we should drop on our knees and thank God Almighty that it is only our good girls and not terrorists who breezed past our immigration officers with such ease. But it leaves you scared. If no less an authority than the PS herself can say that that is actually what happened, and you believe her because of the high office from which she speaks, then Lord have mercy upon us. Next time the bad guys decide to have a go at us, we are toast.

The second way is to believe that the PS was not telling the truth. The Prisons team simply did not commit the crime they are being callously accused of.
As the best among us, they just did what they always do, that is, to represent us overseas. They are not criminals. They are heroines. Little girls should be taught to be like them and not like the officials who give them a bad name in cover to their abysmal incompetence.

BLAME GAME

One of the lowest markers of managerial ineptitude is to blame your subordinates in public.

In polite society, subordinates are praised in public and rebuked in private. But in Kenya, the practice is to throw them under the bus.

Senior officials rush to do this to get themselves out of the corners their blunders box them into. Moral standards are so low, if they exist at all, that even in a case like this when the subordinates have made no mistake at all, somebody is clutching at straws trying to manufacture some.

So, if the PS was not telling the truth as the balance of probabilities suggests, what does that say about the credibility of any statements coming out of her office from now henceforth? And which do you prefer, to believe her or to doubt her? I wonder which one she herself prefers.

The other story in the week that exposed our dire situation came from Dar es Salaam.

We learnt that for qualifying for the final stage of the Africa Nations Cup this coming June, the players and technical staff of the Tanzanian national football team, Taifa Stars, have become land owners.

President John Pombe Magufuli awarded each team member some land in Dodoma, the national capital, and a token of Sh500,000.

This exposed the heartache that every member of Harambee Stars must feel. And they are not alone; we feel for them, too.

Our boys defeated Zanzibar to win the 2017 Cecafa Challenge Cup in Machakos. Thereafter, Deputy President William Ruto promised them a Sh50 million bounty and a state-of-the-art team bus if they qualified for this year’s Africa Cup of Nations. They duly did — and are still waiting for their promise to be kept.

Breaking promises has severe adverse effects on a person. The disappointment it causes erodes one’s capacity to trust. It makes one feel taken for granted.

It tells you that you are not important. It makes it hard to respect the breaker of the promise in future. Promises produce more promises and unfulfilled they, engender a culture of dishonesty.

It becomes all right to make commitments that one does not intend to keep. Soon, everybody disappoints everybody. This is the moral wasteland that has been created by our leaders. What unspeakable revulsion one must feel at this unnecessary cruelty inflicted so casually at our best players.

What did they do, other than win for us, to deserve such treatment? Are our leaders so tone deaf, so bereft of compassion, so invested in personal advancement and so cruel that no means are off-limits in justifying the end?

In more than 40 years interviewing sportsmen and women, more memorable encounters than I can count come to mind.

And one persists, especially in the circumstances such as we are in now. It is the story of heartbreak that Austin Oduor told me. The captain of so far Kenya’s most successful football team told me how officials conned the players after their great Africa Cup Winners Cup (today’s Confederation Cup) win in 1987.
The promise made to the players was that if they reached the semi-finals, they would get parcels of land just like those President Magufuli gave his boys this week.

Highly motivated, the players went one up, not only reaching the semi-finals but the finals as well. And for good measure, they actually won the Cup. But once they did, the officials evaporated and not once did they hear of their promised gift again. Years later, many of those players took their disappointment to their graves.

The moral bankruptcy of the Bible-wielding officials who led their trusting charges up the garden path and abandoned them when victory was achieved is repeated today.

It is a culture that has gained normalcy. There is no public outrage at such revolting conduct, only reward for high office with the possibility of still higher.
For Austin, their historic victory brought him no joy; it just shone a torch on the darkest corners of the souls of the people who purported to mind the players’ welfare — as it still does today.

These are the wilderness years of Kenya sport. The predatory instincts of many people in leadership positions are at their most pronounced.

Away from the games of smoke and mirrors, risks for sanction at abuse of public office is at its lowest.

But it hasn’t always been like this. It certainly was not like this in Kenneth Matiba’s day, that KFF chief and Sports Minister of blessed memory who was a sportsman’s sportsman.

It also won’t always be like this. It is impossible that good leaders won’t emerge from us, however long that takes. But for now, we can only endure the grim misery of the choices we made.