Lessons from Kenneth Kaunda and Arsenal win after losing streak

A hopeful Arsenal fan holds up a banner reading 22 years of waiting ends this season on May 18, 2026.[AFP]

Two things happened last week that Kenyans are still talking about. One happened here, in this country, on live television, at a press conference that went sideways in the best possible way.

The other happened in England, on a football pitch, in the kind of final minutes that make non-football people suddenly interested in football. Both involved a red shirt. Both involved a refusal. And between them, they have something serious to say about the state of this nation's courage.

The first refusal happened at a fuel press conference that was turning slippery. Even a briefing by Cabinet Secretaries could not hold its footing. Their statement felt laboured, strained, and unclear, leaving the country unsure about what had actually been said.

Was the matatu strike on or off? Were stakeholders satisfied with the ten-shilling adjustment, and was life now returning to normal?

But while the nation was still turning that over, and as the country watched live on prime-time television, a man in a red shirt stepped forward from the backline. His gestures said he was unhappy. His words confirmed it: "With all due respect..." He was clear-headed and had no patience for vagueness. He wanted the air cleared: "The strike is still on."

The moment appeared to catch the Cabinet Secretaries flat-footed. As they rose, they neither agreed with him nor contradicted him. But one constituency sided with him clearly, the people.

For the next few hours, Kennedy Kaunda of the East African Tour Guides and Drivers Association moved from obscurity to hero. Then, almost as quickly, from hero to suspect and disappeared from subsequent press conferences entirely.

People began asking: Where is the red-shirt man? Some went further, accusing him of having been quieted by a brown envelope from a high office in the system.

That is precisely where the story deepens. The arc of Kennedy Kaunda clarity, courage, consequence, then conspicuous absence, is not just a news cycle. It is a moral anatomy.

It shows what systems do to truth-tellers when the cameras move on. Corrupt cultures rarely carry good people for long. Eventually, they isolate them, discredit them, or push them to the margins because integrity unsettles spaces built on compromise.

The second refusal happened thousands of kilometres away. Arsenal, in their red shirts, were unsure about their season, which could have gone disastrously like the previous three. Until it happened with a game to go.

Two red shirts. Same colour. Different theatres. One word, one header, and between them, a whole theology of courage this country needs to sit with seriously.

Courage is not the absence of fear. It is the disciplined navigation of it, fearing the right things, in the right measure, at the right time, for the right reasons. It is not a single act but a disposition of character, formed over time, expressed under pressure, recognisable by its proportion. Neither red shirt was reckless. Neither was paralysed. Both were calibrated.

Courage is also self-affirmation, the refusal to be swallowed by fear, silence, or the social weight of the room, when disappearing would be the easier path. Kennedy Kaunda was not merely making a procedural correction.

He was insisting that his conscience, his knowledge, and his witness could not be dissolved by protocol or seniority. That is not just civic boldness. That is ontological courage, the courage of a man insisting on his own existence in a room designed to erase him.

So was Arsenal. The team that keeps pressing on, when both lungs and logic have filed their objection, is refusing to be swallowed by circumstance. That refusal goes deeper than tactics. It is moral endurance in boots.

Here, the two moments part ways, and this is where the deeper argument lives.

Keep pressing

One red shirt was arrested for a moment. The other extended one. Kennedy Kaunda said, in effect: this distortion must not stand. Arsenal said, in effect: this story is not finished. Nations need both instincts in their bloodstream, the ability to stop a falsehood as it forms, and the resolve to keep pressing when every indicator says the matter is closed.

The prophetic tradition in Scripture understood the first instinct well. The prophet does not interrupt because they enjoy the discomfort of the room. They interrupt because silence, at the moment of distortion, becomes complicity.

Jeremiah did not ask whether the palace was the appropriate venue. He stepped forward because he had grasped the basic calculus of moral courage: the cost of speaking is real, but the cost of silence is worse. "With all due respect" is the modern heir of a very old tradition.

The second instinct, endurance under pressure, refusing to ratify what is not yet final, is equally biblical. It is the texture of Gethsemane, where every human impulse argued for withdrawal, yet the pressing continued.

It is active, load-bearing endurance, not passive waiting, but staying under the weight without buckling. Arsenal's late goals are, in this reading, a parable of that endurance played out in ninety minutes.

One spirituality says: do not let the lie stand. The other says: Do not let the moment close before its time. One guards the beginning, ensuring that what is announced matches what is true. The other guards the end, ensuring that what looks finished has been given its full chance to resolve otherwise.

One is the woman who stands in the village baraza and says, quietly but finally, "That is not what happened" at cost, before a crowd that prefers the comfortable version. The other is the farmer who keeps working during a dry season past the point of sense, because he has seen the rains come late before.

But return to Kennedy Kaunda because his story does not end with the interruption. It ends with the disappearance. And the disappearance is the harder lesson.

The most dangerous political force is not the openly wicked but the quietly compliant, those who let distortion pass because intervention costs too much. Kennedy Kaunda interrupted that dynamic on live television before the entire nation.

What the system apparently did next was not argue with him. It absorbed him. Removed him from the room. Let the brown envelope rumour do its quiet work. This is how mature systems of impunity operate: not by silencing courage loudly, but by making it vanish politely.

So the question this week is not only who will step forward? It is: what happens to those who do? A country that produces courageous individuals but builds no structures to protect and vindicate them will keep consuming its own best moments.

Kennedy Kaunda's red shirt was not enough on its own. It needed an institution, a public, a culture willing to say: we will not let this man quietly walk out of the room.

Two red shirts. One arrested a moment. The other refused to let the game end. Kenya needs both. What it keeps producing instead is the third shirt, the one worn by the man who was in the room, said the true thing, and was never seen again. That shirt has no colour. It has only one vacancy.