Government should address real issues in sports docket

Whether he is sleeping on the job or sleeping through the job is not the question. The question is not whether Sports Cabinet Secretary Ababu Namwamba is clean or dirty.

It is not whether he is just a celebrity CS either. The question of who is after Ababu Namwamba should not even feature in the hierarchy of puzzlement surrounding Kenyan sport. The question, in my opinion, is, what will it take to clean up this docket? Why is it so hard to drive back the cartels who’ve successfully cornered the market and taken federations hostage?

For a country endowed with international-quality talent in football, athletics and swimming, why has the sports industry refused to grow?

Namwamba was on the hot seat this week, answering to legislators who surprisingly had legitimate questions to ask. It provided a swoon worthy moment, given that the vitriol mostly came from his own Kenya Kwanza camp and the peculiar fact that the only ones who stood up to shield him were opposition legislators, but I digress. We were talking about questions. And one of the  questions he was asked is, are you ready to resign?

To which he answered that there is no sufficient ground to necessitate his resignation, as he believes he is competent enough.

That’s a slippery word, “competent.” A word drenched in caveat. Competent isn’t a demographic segment. It doesn’t mean excellence. It isn’t the centre ground. It isn’t brilliance and is not commitment, although it could be both simultaneously, depending on one’s perspective. Competent is performance measured by those who are busy doing something else.

When Namwamba took over the sports docket, which was a slight downgrade from the Foreign Affairs docket he had initially been associated with, only those who don’t follow local sports closely viewed him as the magic bullet that would streamline the industry with one wave of the magic wand.

Those of us who revolve around sports knew that he faced a task that was probably beyond anyone. His enormous in-tray underlined that.

Here’s a question: Which is weirder? The fact that the government has abandoned its role in nurturing talent and growing the sports industry into the powerhouse it needs to be, has hijacked the Sports Fund by diverted that should be dedicated solely to sports and directed that the money be shared with other well-funded ministries such as that of Health and Tourism, has allocated peanuts to sports in every financial budget reading since independence, or the fact that the same government now expects the job of cleaning up sports to be magically handled by one person?  

The attacks, some fear, are a knee-jerk reaction to the President’s dress down of CSs at State House a few weeks ago. And the fact that they come amid anxiety over a looming reshuffle make the sudden interest in the growth of local sports seem disingenuous.

I don’t care who is after Ababu or why, I know a good-faith process when I see it. A good-faith process aimed at bringing positive change in local sports goes like this: Invest generously in local sports by building top notch, modern sports infrastructure, build sports academies across the country to nurture young talent, and then appoint competent (that word again!) people to manage the industry. It is that simple, and also that complex. Over to you, government.