No guarantee that former players make good managers of their national football federations

A linesman during a a football game. [File]

To write that Kenyan football is in limbo is not just an understatement, but a lie, because it is dead.

Its current state is not new, and it started going down the grave several years ago, and we all saw it, but did nothing because we were happy with those who were ruining it and slowly killing it.

People tend to blame the so-called transition committee that was set up by the Ministry of Sports, but forget that the Ministry came in at the last minute when it was about to be lowered in to the grave.

Of course the Ministry's job is not to impoverish sports but help federations do better.

As I have pointed out, the rot in Kenyan football runs deep, and the current Cabinet Secretary for Sports probably did not dress it well, but the jury is still out there, for there are so many competing forces in Kenyan football, and all want to ruin it.

Stakeholders, whoever or whatever those are, keep screaming that running or even ruining Kenyan football should be left to the experts.

Experts here being those who represented Kenya on international football pitches or just those who have played football.

They give examples of other countries, but forget that in such places, people are not inherently corrupt like in Kenya and seek those offices to make things better, not to get back at their enemies, real and imagined.

Of course former footballers have been successful as heads of their federations in certain African countries, but it is not a guarantee that things will be all rosy as Cameroon's Samuel Eto'o has proven.

When Eto'o became the head of Cameroon's football federation in 2021, Kenyans said that is how it should be, but the other day, things changed when the federation revised terms of office for its head from four years to seven years, to run retroactively. Meaning his first term will run till 2028.

How he will perform cannot be predicted, but he is living proof that even former footballers enter federation offices and change the rules of the game, to favour themselves.