Nyamweya's speech the longest in the history of football?

Distinguished delegates, fellow candidates; ladies and gentlemen. May I pay special tribute to the Ad-Hoc FKF Electoral Board and the Electoral Bureau, the Institute for Education on Democracy (IED) for conducting a very smooth election so far despite facing numerous challenges during the electioneering period. As the polls climax with today’s national exercise, I salute every one of you that is here today for having been elected into office as officials of the branch; congratulations to you and to those who elected you having been successful at the sub-branch elections held last year.

Unlike those of us who are awaiting to have our mandate renewed to serve for a further four years, allow me to take a moment to reflect on the story of our journey so far since we were elected into office in 2011.

We came into office, inheriting a nearly non-existent federation following almost a decade of factional leadership and wrangling between the defunct Kenya Football Federation and the dissolved Football Kenya Limited. You would remember very well that our predecessors did not even hand-over anything to us, a fact that further compounded our challenges in the early days of our term. Yet I consider myself fortunate to have had a very strong team of determined individuals who together we have worked tirelessly to sail the ship thus far. We are so fortunate that we had personnel that enhance our vision with their special talents, talents given willingly and passionately.

At the beginning and throughout our term in office, we continually faced challenges but how we viewed them has defined us all through because we constantly asked ourselves whether to see the challenges as stepping-stones or as obstacles.

If we choose to see them as obstacles, then the challenges we faced could have been viewed as problems that need to be overcome along with all the negative connotations associated with problems. A great deal of wasted energy could have been spent focusing on a negative mindset.

However, we chose to see the challenges as stepping-stones - opportunities that we have encountered along the way for us to use, to step on so that we can achieve more, develop further and ultimately actualize more of our goals.

We opted to focus on one or two main areas to help us define our vision amid diversity as stepping stones and not as obstacles. As former president of the United States of America, John F Kennedy, once said Things do not happen. Things are made to happen, we have come thus far because we inspired ourselves by these great words and we made things happen, the best way we could under the prevailing circumstances.

So what did we make happen, one may ask? Well, to those who doubted our ability it may have as well been a term of little or no achievement but a deep, honest and sincere reflection would lead one to admission that we have a lot to be proud of even though we have also faltered along the way because it is human to make mistakes, directly or indirectly.

Indeed, success and failure, trials and tribulations are inevitable encounters that we all meet on our journey through life yet great achievements that leave that indelible mark in the world are a result of patience, which takes commitment and comes with plenty of failure along the way.

The urgency to restructure operations to enable the federation deliver on its mandate to manage the game was a priority we undertook, in addition to reform the league System to ensure the game could be played meaningfully at all the levels. Today, we have succeeded in that endeavour and have a transformative national secretariat and a league System of seven tiers with the ward league as the lowest level. We have the top two divisions having broadcast sponsors, a milestone never achieved before.

There is no more friction between the leagues and the federation following our signing of a Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with the Kenyan Premier League to provide the framework within which to operate.

Colleagues, our women football was a forgotten area of our game which we have successfully revived and currently have established two divisions of the women league. The Harambee Starlets, who were never ranked by FIFA, have now broken into the bracket of high-fliers. To attest to this, they just missed the 2016 Olympic Games after narrowly losing to South Africa, something we are all proud of and a learning curve that we will build on long into the future.

Fellow Kenyans, our sponsorship portfolio was thin and almost a sham when we took over in 2011 but we have worked very hard to transform the financial fortunes of the federation through corporate partnership, despite the negativity we have faced. Today, the national and county government agencies are close partners of FKF and we have a bigger list of corporate partners.