By Kilemi Mwiria
Last Sunday’s football violence following the AFC Leopards/Gor Mahia game was a national shame. Football hooliganism is of course not restricted to Africa. English football is famous on this score. However, English football hooligans do not spill into the streets to disrupt traffic and inconvenience citizens who have no idea what the problem is.
Our football hooligans can’t quite appreciate that soccer, like any sport is guided by rules and that their team can also lose. If you can’t accept defeat, you should not expect to be cheered when you win.
If you can’t live with the decisions of the referee, then create your own computer game where you can flatter yourself with artificially generated scores. Some of us are living in days gone by when fans would encourage a player not to miss the opposing player’s leg if he missed the ball.
Others view football games as an extension of primitive tribal warfare. This is why contests between Gor Mahia and AFC Leopards are like a clash of two ethnic groups, not two football teams. This behavior has infiltrated the stadia management and security organs, refereeing, the fans and politics, where responsibilities and cheering are discharged from a tribal angle. Some players do not make the situation any better by provoking their fans to violence through blatant tackles and insubordination to the referee.
The consequences of last Sunday’s football madness are grave for the game and a national football management that is not one of the most respected by Fifa. It is not the kind of experience that will encourage those ready to invest in football for entertainment and business or the professionalisation of soccer with the resultant employment creation.
It is bad for sports’ tourism and makes soccer an unattractive past time for families, children, women and fans that are in it for entertainment.
This is why whoever was responsible for Sunday’s madness should be severely punished. Unless known football hooligans are arrested, prosecuted and banished from stadia, we should expect recurrence of last Sunday’s primitive behavior.
Players who provoke violence by their on-pitch antics should be denied the opportunity to play in the major league while teams that misbehave repeatedly should be relegated to division two. Their political leaders should condemn their behaviour publicly.
Nor is it misplaced to ask for civic education for fans who resort to violence when their teams lose, focusing on: the rules of the game, good sportsmanship, basic decorum, and to hammer the point that genuine football lovers watch the game to be entertained, not to be stoned.
And why should we still have football teams dominated by a single ethnic group and still talk nationalism. Gor Mahia and AFC Leopards should not insist on maintaining their colonial tribal identities (for the colonist, tribal teams were an extension of the divide and rule policy).
They have to open up to non-Luhya and no-Luo players, respectively; not through some form of tokenism but by complying with the constitutional requirement that no more than one third of the players are from their respective ethnic groups. In any case, we now know that other Kenyans can also play good football, just as we know that athletic prowess is no longer a monopoly of the Kalenjins.
The writer is MP for Tigania West and Assistant Minister for Higher Education, Science and Technology
