Transparency is the key to reforming sports management in Kenya

We have watched and wept in despair as our national football team has foundered in the field. We have blamed their strings of failures on the poor management of football in Kenya. We have, however, frequently rejoiced in the triumphs of our star athletes - men and women who have taken the world by storm and have become the bane of all nations in the long-distance races that we, as a nation, take pride in. 

It is a little-known and seldom-discussed fact that sports management in Kenya is rife with corruption, tribalism and outright crime. No sporting federation in Kenya has escaped the scourge of mismanagement or criminality. Just in 2006/07, we were astounded by stories of sexual harassment that our female athletes underwent in training camps. To date, we remain ignorant of whether investigations were conducted, what the findings were, and who, if at all, was punished for abusing our heroines-in-the-making.

So long as our athletes seem to be decimating their opponents, we are content to let sleeping dogs lie and are unwilling to lift the curtain behind which lie the ills that bedevil the athletic fraternity. Instead, we concentrate our ire on the hapless managers of football in Kenya to the total exclusion of all else. We lament the disasters that keep on befalling the Harambee Stars every time they appear in international matches and call for 'reform' as if that demand alone is enough to change the way in which football is managed in Kenya. When our rugby 7s team was flying high, we simply refused to acknowledge that if it were not for the small dedicated band of supporters and well-wishers, our team would be unable to make their international matches for lack of national moral and material support. It is the same case with hockey, basketball, volleyball, cricket, tennis and swimming.

Paul Otuoma, the Minister for Sports and Youth Affairs, blows hot and cold when it comes to the matter of reforming sports management in Kenya. It is a fact that where the Government of Kenya gets involved, the results are usually mixed. This has been the case since before the beginning of time. It is time we woke up from our stupor and took a more hands-on approach to the reform agenda.

In any institution, transparency is the silver bullet that we can employ to reform the institution. The opacity behind which sporting managers in Kenya operate has engendered in them the impunity for which we blame our politicians the ills that bedevil the country. No one, outside the few truly committed supporters of the various sporting federations, knows who these managers are, how much they earn, what rules they operate under, what budgets the manage, where they operate from, how many sportsmen labour under their management, and how much money these federations actually make. As a consequence, they are in positions of strength, making decisions knowing that no one is capable of calling them on wrong or erroneous ones. If a CEO remained at the helm of major company year in, year out while it went to the dogs, his shareholders would not stand idly by. They would take steps to have him removed.

Many of the federations in Kenya are managed using national resources. In that respect, we are all shareholders in these federations and it is time we started demanding greater accountability from these managers and their CEOs. Until Kenyans realise that life does not just revolve around their individual needs, and that certain abstract concepts as national pride are crucial to our sense of national identity, the corrupt and incompetent will keep selling us a bill of goods. It is time we started leveraging the spirit of reform that has captured the political arena with the express purpose of reforming sports management in Kenya. Databases must be made public. W need to know who these managers are, what their expertise or experiences are, how much they earn, how much the spend, how much revenue they generate, who the top coaches are, where they are based, what they earn and what they are willing to give to the nation. 

We need to know the absolute numbers of our athletes, what their disciplines are, how successful they have been, and what resources they need to get better. If we wish to so dominate other fields as we have dominated long-distance running, it is time we got more involved in the affairs of sports in Kenya. Otherwise, the calls for reforming football will be our perennial cry every time the Harambee Stars have their asses handed to them by Rwanda, Burundi and Eritrea. And, this is not a job we can outsource to the hapless Ministers for Sports that we have had over the past decade.