Some articles are better started with a conclusion, and this is one of them: Kenya’s national football team, Harambee Stars, has a bleak future because of broken communication systems that pretty much affect all of Kenya’s footballing scene.

In January, I posted on X that the problem with Kenyan football is Sheng, which equals the ‘mtaa’ mentality. Some incensed Kenyans asked how, and I said I would explain, when, I did not know – but when the Football Kenya Federation unveiled Benni McCarthy as the new national team coach on Monday, I remembered that unlike the South African tactician, I have a small task to accomplish.

McCarthy needs the support of all well-meaning Kenyans because his chances of succeeding are close to nil considering the hurdles in his path, the first being the national language of Kenyan football with its ‘mtaa’ mentality appendage.

For years, the chosen language of Kenyan football has been Sheng, which we have been made to believe is for the suppressed, the downtrodden, and the marginalised urban dwellers who had to come up with their lingo to confuse enemies who are not in their circle or their ‘mtaa’.

The ‘mtaa’ people who run Kenyan football have invariably used Sheng – which I call an indefinable ‘language’ without any commercial value – to build an impenetrable community, a brotherhood that keeps at bay those deemed not to be marginalised urban dwellers.

Also, they nurse the age-old belief that footballing talent can only be found in sections of society inhabited by the downtrodden – the ‘mtaa’ – where messages are passed using Sheng to keep trade secrets safe from enemies, real or perceived.

There was a generation of great Kenyan footballers who came from such backgrounds. Their talents were nurtured on dusty pitches but times have changed and football is increasingly becoming an elite sport with academies in posh neighbourhoods.

Coaches of local clubs or their mentors come from that generation and they still cling to the belief that footballing talent and administrators can only be found in places of hardship where the enemy is befuddled through the use of Sheng.

To this group, Sheng is not just a language but a lifestyle – it is their badge, their identity. Thus the language of instruction during training sessions is Sheng, which in another publication in 2013, I described as “a mishmash of gobbledegook that some Kenyans think is a panacea for tribalism”.

While football is a team sport and a game of laws – with its most important law being: use common sense – Sheng is amorphous, malleable, lacks structure, and the meaning of words changes as you move from one residential area to another or even from one house to another.

Language of instruction will be one of the biggest problems for McCarthy. Save for a few Kenyan footballers who play in Europe and Asia, most of his charges are instructed in the amorphous Sheng, but he will need to communicate in a structured language that all players understand. And that will take time because the local players will spend more time with their Sheng-speaking instructors and mentors than with him.

We can argue ad hominem that this language barrier narrative is unfounded because Kenya has had foreign coaches before, but in Kenya’s recent footballing history, how far did the non-Kenyan coaches take Harambee Stars?

That Kenyan football’s national language is Sheng was evident during the unveiling of McCarthy. Nine out of 10 questions he fielded from football journalists were about leagues in Europe because Kenyan football can only be discussed in Sheng and he’s yet to fall in line.

A bigger problem he will have to deal with is the ‘mtaa’ mentality of his bosses and local assistants, who, regardless of their pronouncements in public, will never see him as a member of their team. This has been the bane of Kenyan football since these chaps are thick as thieves, and have built a fortress around themselves.

They are mentally old and see football through the archaic lenses of a period when clubs paid peanuts to nothing and footballers had to fend for themselves. They are incorrigible, they worship at the altar of suffering and find it hard to embrace the fact that footballers need to be taken care of.

They suffered, and it follows that current players have to suffer, so the available resources end up in their bank accounts and in the pockets of certain legacy and digital media journalists who sing their praises.

As McCarthy joins the list of coaches with a pipe dream of taking Kenya to the World Cup, his nightmare will be dealing with people who violate football’s Law 18 because of their ‘mtaa’ mentality that is powered by Sheng.

— The writer is the Managing Editor of the Alliance for Science (AfS). The views are solely his and do not necessarily reflect the position of AfS or its partners