'Karibu Kenya, Sono, but beware of our politics, it can mess you up'

The World Cup season brought us good news and bad news.

Let us dispose of the bad news.

The Confederation of Africa Football (Caf) banned Aden Marwa from all football activities for life.

Our premier referee was found to have engaged in inappropriate conduct in the course of his duties. In plain language, he accepted a bribe.
Although he was entrapped, it is difficult to find fault with Caf’s punishment.

From the moment he was filmed accepting that envelope, the train was coming his way and it arrived, running over him with merciless force.

I believe he still hasn’t come to terms with such an ignominious ending to his stellar career.

When he does, I hope he finds time to talk to one of us, with uttermost sincerity, with the aim of achieving redemption.

This was a good man who strayed into the stench-filled streets of Gomorrah and they consumed him.

There was never going to be any other outcome; his fate was sealed.

But I urge him not to live out the rest of his life in this shame.

Come forward, Aden Marwa, good people do indeed fall, but it must not be the end of everything. From the times of antiquity which recorded the rise from its own ashes of a bird called the phoenix to this day, history’s stories are full of redemption, even after everything seems lost. There is hope for you.

The other bad news was the capitulation of African teams at the World Cup.

Although their progression was more a hope than an expectation, the scale of collapse surprised us all.

The further bad news is that African football development seems more predicated on exporting players to Europe than developing strong grassroots systems.

The gulf in prestige between the continent’s premier football showcase, the Africa Cup of Nations (Afcon) and the second tier Africa Nations Championships (Chan) which exclusively features home-based players, is as wide as an ocean. A way must be found to bridge it.

Now for the good news. Jomo Sono, one of Africa’s pre-eminent football sons, plans to invest in Kenya.

To have such a great man amongst us is the best news I have heard about our game in several years.

Yes, years! Sono is not your regular fly-by-night tenderpreneur with a briefcase on each hand bulging with loot from a country’s national treasury.

HAWKED APPLES AND SWEETS

He comes with one of the most compelling success stories any journalist would want to write and I regret that his visit was so short that before I knew he was in town, he was gone.

But I am looking for him and I will get him. Here is a man born at a time when apartheid’s roots reached deepest, who lost his father to a road crash at the age of eight and whose mother subsequently abandoned him.

He hawked apples and sweets to support his desperately poor octogenarian grandparents who had taken him in.

But a chance abstention by a player in his father’s old team, Orlando Pirates, gave him that all-important break.

He filled the gap, became the team’s most influential player, went to America and played alongside Pele and Franz Beckenbauer at the New York Cosmos, returned home to found the Jomo Cosmos FC and raised some of South Africa’s most fabled stars such as Philemon Masinga and Mark Fish. Scouting for and developing raw talent is Sono’s point of focus, and this is something Kenya sorely needs.

He is Bafana Bafana’s most successful manager, winning the Africa Cup of Nations as member of the technical staff in 1996 and reaching the final as defending champions in 1998 after only weeks into the job because regular coach Clive Barker had quit in a huff.

As coach in the 2002 World Cup, his team won one match and drew another, scoring a goodly five goals in the process.

Only a 3-2 loss to Spain denied them progress into the round of 16.

Success seems to follow him everywhere and he is in the league of South Africa’s top businessmen. What future has this man seen in Kenya football, for so long a veritable cesspool of mediocre organisation and corruption?

How does he plan to navigate the internecine wars between FKF and KPL?

And most of all, how can he replenish our optimism supplies given that even our reserves are exhausted and we are running on fumes?

We owe former Prime Minister Raila Odinga gratitude for introducing Jomo Sono to us. Because of our intensely tribal politics, Raila doesn’t always get the credit he deserves for his commitment to our football.

We all know that we could be an African power but we are instead every other country’s whipping boys.

He no longer has the bully pulpit of Prime Minister or any influential position in our sports architecture.

Yet he is still using his connections and prestige to change the sorry state of our affairs for the benefit of our youth.

This is something our generation of sports lovers must thank him for.

It can’t be that we must disagree on each and everything just because of differences in our surnames.

***

My epitaph for the Russian World Cup.

The tournament: It was the Waterloo of the great football powers.

In hindsight, the failure of four-time winners Italy to qualify was a harbinger of things to come.

Germany, the defending champions and in my book the world’s safest team to support especially for those with a heart condition, failed to qualify for the second round for the first time in 80 years, finishing bottom of Group ‘F’ thanks to a 2-0 defeat by South Korea.

They became the fourth successive European world champion to collapse at the first hurdle and in the process reinforced the legend of the curse of the World Cup’s defending champions.

Belgium committed regicide by putting Brazil, my Brazil, to the sword in the quarter-finals.

On that gloomy night, July 6, 2018, preceded by a power outage that was rectified just in the nick of time, my World Cup ended.

From then henceforth, there was only an important football tournament taking place in Russia.

My heart bled as I went into denial.

This was not just the safest space I could find, but really the only one.

And because there were so many things to do at the same time, not least of which was the launch of my new book, I fitted my activities into tight mental compartments.

Sometimes I cracked jokes and gave people high fives when another part of my brain was begging for a hug to prop my failing legs.

Kazan was my personal Waterloo and it took long, faltering steps to make peace with what had happened there.

I bore no rancour toward Belgium. I just wished them good luck in their tournament as I dealt with the searing pain of my shattered hopes.

My heart said to me that Brazil did not lose because they are beyond losing, it is we their fans who lost and that is alright because our faith will never die; we loved the players and Tite and his technical team even more than if they had won the World Cup because as Sócrates Brasileiro once wrote, “angry seas never scare us when we face them with the madness of love.”

In the end, for all the dust raised, the tournament ended as I had foreseen.

The astonishingly brave and highly skilled efforts of Croatia notwithstanding, the old script fell into place: the World Cup is the preserve of former winners and France have added another feather in their cap.

From now onwards, the competition heads into unchartered waters. In 2022, it goes into the immensely rich, tiny desert emirate of Qatar, which permanently punches above its weight, and in 2026, expands to 48 teams.

France’s win: When France won the World Cup at home in 1998, some people in the government of conservative President Jacques Chirac grumbled that it did not represent the face of the country.

It was overwhelmingly black in a predominantly white country. Of course, that was true. Post-apartheid South Africa faced the same problem with its national rugby team, the Springboks, which was 100 per cent white in a black majority nation.

The 2018 French team seemed even darker in colour than its forbears.

This made many Africans to identify with it. They rooted for the super power when natural instincts should have driven them to the underdog’s corner.

Croatia is a small country with just slightly more than four million people, equivalent to Nairobi’s.

But as they wished, big country defeated small country and I went to bed feeling a tad hopeless.

The main effect of France’s victory is that millions of African children will dream of migrating there – or anywhere else in Europe.

They will be powerfully motivated by the dire corruption in their countries which makes them see the future as hopeless.

Competitive football has the narrowest windows in life – an average of 10 years – and if it is apparent to you that foreigners attach a premium to your future while your own people trample it underfoot, foreign citizenship is the wise way to go.

By the time you make even the slightest dent on the entrenched bad ways of your leaders, your future is already behind you.

For young Africans, the possibility of living in the rich and well organised countries of their former colonial masters is immensely attractive. And it is difficult to fault them.

Which would you prefer: to be a French World Cup winner being cheered by the MP from your native African country or to play with torn shirts and threadbare boots on a potholed murram field as a Kenyan with no hope of ever qualifying for that tournament because the same MP has used your money to fly first class and frolic in a five-star resort?

Don’t bother sending me the answer.