FKF should talk less and weigh their unending promises

That Kenyan sports fans are an easily excitable lot is not in doubt. Also not in doubt is the fact that sports administrators get even more excited than fans and tend to believe their own hype.

It is not a crime for fans to be excited, especially when their heroes and heroines are doing wonders in different parts of the world.

But it is wrong, almost criminal, when sports administrators confuse fans' excitement with happiness, and use their positive attitude to short-change them by continuously being economical with the truth.

You can argue that Kenya’s sports administrators are working under difficult conditions and are doing all they can to ensure that the country’s athletes — in the wider sense of the word — have the best facilities which should help them perform better.

But when you consider that they speak from both sides of the mouth, and foam at both, and many a time as I have pointed out about above, are never ready to speak the truth, and nothing but the truth, it is not easy to sympathise with them.

Several months ago, the leadership of Football Kenya Federation, which upon taking office over promised, and continues to over-promise, went all out and told Kenyans about some deal with a sports wear manufacturer which was going to kit all national teams.

For a group of fans who never know the national team’s colours, and get surprised every time the team is playing, this was one of the best things to happen to Kenyan football in a long time.

The federation’s boss also knew that this piece of news was going to get the fans all excited, and promised, as he always does, that replica kits will hit the shelves by the beginning of June, and fans who have always wanted to don them will have to worry no more.

But when the kits, both replica and genuine ones, were supposed to be available, they were not there, and neither were the FKF officials at hand to explain what is going on.

The fans did not cause a ruckus, probably because they understood what this office had inherited, and that it was spending so much time putting its ducks in a row, and it was just a matter of days before things got better.

Days turned into weeks, and weeks into months, and then came a muted announcement from FKF’s leadership that the kit deal had fallen through and the contract was no more.

Contracts get cancelled all the time, and deals fall through, but if you consider how emphatically the announcement about the kit deal was made, and the confidence the FKF leadership exuded when promising that this was a done deal, you would be excused for concluding that they are full of hot air.

So many promises have been made, and the biggest of them all is that come 2022, Harambee Stars will be in Qatar, as a team in the Fifa World Cup and not as spectators.

But if we are to use the kits deal as the latest example of FKF over-promising, then Kenyan football fans should start working on how to manage their expectations.

The writer is an editor with The Standard, Weekend Editions