Let us hope that this time, thieves serially ruining our sport will be brought to justice

What you need to know:

  • Maybe they will take cue from the Auditor General’s report and go for the people who cannot account for the Sh1.7 billion missing from last year’s IAAF Under-18 competition.
  • But we have been here before. We have witnessed theatrical arrests followed by prosecutions that led to no convictions.
  • So we can only watch what is going on with restrained hope. But it is hope all the same.

Three days after last year’s IAAF World Under-18 athletics championships ended in Nairobi, I visited the athletes’ village at Kenyatta University.

The shine in the façade of the hostels was impressive from a distance. But looks from distances tell only part of the story.

Once inside the rooms, I was assailed by the corrosive smell of fresh oil paint. I gasped for fresh air.

To open some doors, it was necessary to use force because the wet paint had turned to glue, sticking the doors to their frames.

The action of operating the doors before the paint was completely dry left unsightly surfaces all around the points of contact.

And then the workers must have used timber that was not fully cured to replace some doors when they set out to refurbish the buildings.

The distortion in the alignment of some doors to their frames was obvious evidence of this; wood curing was setting in.

In addition to the sticky paint, this made the otherwise simple act of opening and closing some doors an exercise.

After refurbishing the windows, the workers didn’t seem to have any time left to clean out the paint that had dripped on the panes.

This left lines of it on the glass.

The lines advertised poor workmanship. They were ugly and annoying because they got in the way of the view of the campus out in the distance below.

Reeling from the pungent smell of the paint, I asked my companion whether indeed those rooms had been used by the competitors in that condition.

Of course they had been, and I knew it. In fact, wasn’t it even worse at the time of occupation?

The paint was drier now than it had been two weeks before when the first arrivals to the village had taken up their rooms.

I thought about them, those young men and women, and I knew that in the general scheme of things, this was the least of the grievances anybody could talk about; that the competition was taking place was an achievement enough.

That is the standard by which we operate. And yet it mattered.

I shook my head and wondered why, with four years to prepare for the event, it still had to be a frenetic dash to be ready on time. I buried myself in thought as I agonised: must it always have to be like this?

The dividend for the University, which had turned back somersaults to avail its facilities to the organisers free of charge, was a synthetic running track of similar quality to that of the competition venue, the Safaricom Stadium, Kasarani.

This track was donated in good time for the athletes to use for training and save them tiring back and forth trips to Kasarani during non-competition days.

But when I went there, I found only the tarmac foundation on which it was to be laid.

The track itself was nowhere in sight. I was told that even if it had been shipped from Italy with plenty of time to lay it at KU, it was still baking inside containers in the port of Mombasa. So the athletes never got to use it and they were made to needlessly shuttle between the village and Kasarani.

In June this year, almost a year after the championships, I returned to KU. Someone told me the track had finally surfaced but strangely, only four lanes of it. I went to the field to take a look.

Indeed, the running track had been laid but it had only four lanes.

A standard athletics track has six to eight lanes. I made inquiries and everybody I spoke to said they were expecting the full complement of eight lanes. They said they were made to understand that that was the donation. I was not able to establish the truth of the matter.

On Wednesday this week, the splash in the Daily Nation hit my face as a missile would. “Sports ministry in Sh1.7billion scam,” it screamed.

And, quoting a report from the Auditor General, the story reported: “Half of the money the government pumped into the IAAF World Under-18 Championships in Nairobi last year was stolen in yet another plunder of public funds.”

The report says that Sh1.7 billion out of a total allocation of Sh3.5 billion could not be accounted for.

Furthermore, there are debts amounting to Sh138 million yet to be settled. For a number of months after the championships, Nation Sport beat the drum of outstanding debts to pulp, even pleading for the help of the highest and mightiest.

Nothing seems to have come of these pleas made on behalf of law-abiding suppliers who only just tried to earn an honest day’s living.

I read the Auditor General’s report shortly after listening to the plight of a friend of my friend. He is in the IT business. The government owes him Sh300 million and he has not been paid for two years. He has laid off most of his workers and any time now, he will wind up the business.

I have heard of stories of the nefarious activities of some of the people entrusted with public money but the one I was told by my friend froze me.

“That is the intention,” he said. “To bankrupt the company, to kill it and once it dies, the money will be released and shared out amongst those whose duty was to pay it to its rightful owners upon completion of the work. People are enriching themselves this way.”

The exhausted owners of the dead company would be so busy trying to find other means of surviving that they won’t have the wherewithal to fight for justice.

This is the crisis that predators in government create and exploit.

In terms of meting out the most callous cruelty to others and calling it success in life, these are people clearly in a league of their own. So, more than one year after they supplied goods and services to the Local Organizing Committee of the IAAF Under-18 championships, some traders are still waiting for their payments.

Now they will have to grapple with the outcome of whatever investigations will follow the Auditor General’s report.

The lucrative tenders have long turned into an albatross around their necks.

It will be long and hard and some might not survive the torment.

Meanwhile, some bureaucrats in whose veins runs ice water are going on holiday in dream destinations while staying in their own high end apartments thanks to the money stolen from these hardworking citizens.

What a sinking feeling, that feeling that you are on your own. On the afternoon after Rwanda’s Rayon beat Gor Mahia 2-1 to throw the quarter finals race of this group of the Caf Confederations Cup wide open, I met an old Rwandan friend.

Our meeting was initially set for the morning but he requested we push it to the afternoon so he could sleep longer because he had attended a party held to celebrate Rayon’s unexpected victory.

The party had gone into the wee hours.

I congratulated him on their win but not before pointing out to him that our boys were suffering from a fixture overload.

But I also thought that Rayon’s loss of so many top players was more an asset than a hindrance; with their backs to the wall, they had everything to fight for. They needed to assure themselves that they were still alive and they did.

Then our conversation veered into corruption in Kenya. Among our leaders at whatever level of government, corruption is the day job, I told him and he stopped me on my tracks.

“No,” he said, “Let me tell you something for free. Corruption is Kenya’s way of life. It is not just at the top, it is everywhere. I have been in this country long enough to know that I have to travel with lose money at all times because I will need it for a policeman or a street urchin who might vandalize my car if I don’t bribe him or a watchman who asks me for money just to open the gate – which is his job anyway. The only value Kenyans have in life is money.”

Maybe you should lend us your guy for a while, I told him in jest, referring to President Paul Kagame.

In numerous surveys unconnected with the Rwandan government, the country consistently comes on top as the least corrupt in East Africa and one of the least corrupt in the continent.

Again, he interrupted me.

“He can’t do anything,” he told me.

“To be effective, you need a critical mass of people around you. He can’t succeed if everybody is hell-bent on earning money they don’t deserve. In Kenya, it is money first and everything else latter. No matter how you got it, in Kenya people will respect you if you have money.”

I gave up. And it is because I agreed with him. That was on Monday.

And on Wednesday I read that horrifying Daily Nation splash.

This has become a never ending story, this lurching from scandal to scandal which just elicits social media chatter and nothing far reaching.

There are two new sheriffs in town in the offices of the Director of Public Prosecutions and the Directorate of Criminal Investigations.

Maybe they will take cue from the Auditor General’s report and go for the people who cannot account for the Sh1.7 billion missing from last year’s IAAF Under-18 competition.

But we have been here before. We have witnessed theatrical arrests followed by prosecutions that led to no convictions.

So we can only watch what is going on with restrained hope. But it is hope all the same.