Are we serious about sports?
By Clay Muganda, July 26, 2025Three things worth mentioning happened on Kenya’s sports scene this week. Only three things? Isn’t everything that happens in Kenya’s sports circles worth a mention?
Nah. For a country that has won more Olympic medals than the world’s economic powerhouses and considers itself a regional power in all aspects, some acts of its sports administrators are too embarrassing and should be kept under wraps.
For a nation whose leaders reinvented corruption and made it fashionable, where graft reigns at all levels of the economy and governance, where poverty-is-the-enemy is a socially accepted mantra for thieves, or aspiring ones, the things men and women who are tasked with running sports bodies do are not worth mentioning because they show that sporting entities are filled with jokers who are not serious about the development of sports.
Slightly under a week ago, there was excitement in Kenya’s sports circles when a young Aldrine Kibet was signed by a Spanish football club, Celta Vigo.
The teenager, who is in Kenya’s Under-20 team, joined the LaLiga club’s B-team, Celta Fortuna, “with an eye on gradual integration into the senior setup”.
Good news, and Kenyans should be happy for the young man for escaping Kenya’s sports torture chambers, a prison where athletes go through untold suffering in pursuit of their goals.
While Kenyans were still celebrating Aldrine’s good fortunes, the national football team, the ever-dim Harambee Stars, were on a bus from Tanzania after withdrawing from the CECAFA Four Nations tournament at the last minute because of “unsuitable conditions”.
Other reports showed there were call-ups to the Stars squad that the head coach did not sanction.
Before that could sink in, rugby fans were shocked to learn the amount of money clubs and, subsequently, players will end up with from each leg of the Sevens Circuit.
After the sponsorship deals were announced, it emerged that the players who put in the work to make the circuit a success would be the biggest losers, with most of the funds going to less important activities.
That is the kind of situation Aldrine will not be subjected to.
In other climes where sports are valued, his move would be considered normal because that is always the trajectory: be good in your discipline, move to better pastures.
But in Kenya, it was an exception, so much so that praises were heaped on a former Sports Cabinet Secretary, who was only too glad to take all the credit for the young man’s success.
We can argue that the former CS did not kill Aldrine’s dream, and so it is fine for him to take the credit, but we will be accepting that killing dreams is the job description of Sports ministers or Sports ministry officials, and they are doing Kenyans a favour when one person goes through their hands unscathed.
Whatever the former CS did to see Aldrine succeed is exactly what he was supposed to do, and he should not be gloating over it and nor should we be praising him, considering that several young men and women were equally good in their fields during his time at the ministry but are yet to realise their dreams.
This is because he did not establish structures such as academies like the one in Spain, where Aldrine was before joining the club.
Simply put, Sports ministry officials are not interested in seeing Kenyans excel, but at the same time, they do not lose an opportunity to pose for photographs with Kenya’s sportsmen and women who have won trophies.
On Harambee Stars, we can blame Tanzania all we want for the “unsuitable conditions” because we do not like Tanzania anyway. Still, we cannot forget the high levels of incompetence, coupled with the regressive mtaa mentality at the Football Kenya Federation (FKF).
It could have sent a smaller advance team to verify if the conditions met Kenya’s standards, instead of sending a whole squad and then putting the players on a bus back.
Historically, fumbling and bumbling have been Kenya’s forte when it comes to sports.
In the 1990s, the hosting rights for the 1996 AFCON were awarded to South Africa 14 months before kick-off because Kenya, which was the original selected host, fumbled and failed to build the required facilities in time.
That fumbling led to Kenya getting banned from two subsequent AFCON tournaments – and our leaders and Sports ministry officials moved on like nothing happened.
You never find more stoic Kenyans than those who are at the Sports ministry. They adore failure and are only happy when they see the country’s sportsmen and women suffering.
They want players to worship poverty, a trait that has trickled down to federations, such as the rugby union, which allocate the smallest amount of sponsorship funds to players and spend the bulk on activities that do not contribute to the development of sports and growth of the playing units.
Those three incidents just prove what Kenyans have always suspected: that the job description of Sports ministry officials, ministers, and federation administrators is never to nurture talent, but kill every dream, and make money while at it, at the expense of players’ welfare.
The writer is the Managing Editor of the Alliance for Science (AfS). These views are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the position of AfS or its partners