Those who have played football with me or watch me play in Daystar’s football pitch know that I scream a lot throughout the match, barking orders, lamenting on my team lapses or the other team’s foul play. And I’m not even a captain, neither am I a vice-captain. Coming from Mombasa, I’m used to talking, and being a bit vertically challenged than the rest of the team, I have to be noticed. One other thing, the adrenaline rush during matches makes me breath flames and, and sometimes obscenities hidden in open sarcasm.
Now, the last is always aimed at the referees, mostly fellow students. I always tell them against taking a job they cannot handle. Why convince the TM to let you ref a game when you can’t, I ask them. They all threaten to caution me with a card but it has never happened. I think it’s because my thinly veiled jabs at them are true. While even international referees make mistakes, those exhibited at the campus pitch are downright petty and end up making everything tense. As much as they are willing to officiate the matches, they cannot, thus, they shouldn’t!
Just as our current government is not capable of managing its resources. It shouldn’t! We voted for Mr. Kibaki, and Mr. Odinga, and misters Saitoti, Murungi, Nyong’o, Haji, and ladies Karua, Wavinya, Ongaro and Amina. We voted for all those in the August house bar 22. They campaigned telling us they will deliver Capt. Jack Sparrow to us and many other things with him including roads carpeted with flowers and an alternative to the English Premier League. They promised everything the mwananchi aspires for every five years. We believed them. We did because they can, and because we want a better life for ourselves and the unborn babies we all look forward to carry around and show-off.
They started well, roads, free education, clinics in every corner and we were optimistic about the future, just like when a game starts. Then it started to crumble, corruption, impunity, the botched 2005 referendum and the unmet promises. The ref had started to dictate the game, instead of letting the players do. Wrong calls, unwarranted cautions and his conduct becoming more unbecoming, a mouthful.
Hunger across the country, slow response to emergencies, impunity, detachment with the voters and the list is endless and heartless. There was a competition for newsworthiness between calamities-some natural others man-made and the absurdity of the political class. We started becoming dillusioned and fed-up which culminated in the 2007 PEV. We had reached the end-point, and we will not go back to normal life in the near future, not our generation. We even voted the same guys in, again!
Even then, they still fueled us, politicizing every issue. That’s why we still have IDP’s four years later, but do they care? They do not even realize it, like the referee who waves play on even when a guy is lying on the pitch grotesquely, thinking he is only faking it. They do not care, and we have failed to get that into our cheap minds. All they ever care for is protecting themselves and adding their perks.
Very embarrassing situations they have plunged the country into. Lost Free Education Funds, losing land and Islands to neighbors (surely), maize scandal, a disjointed government that is more embarrassing than hate-filled co-wives, a parliament full of clerks than MPs, and the list gets more endless.
2011, hunger across the country, just like last year, and the year before and the… Al-Shaabab invasion-including a bombing, police brutality and shame, judicial drama, more border invasions and more deaths of Kenyan citizens, and the government sends a diplomatic appeal instead of sending able men and women to the borders.
And the referee blows it all when he (well, she in the case of the popular Tabitha) lets the players suffer from a mixture of adverse weather conditions on the pitch-snow, blizzards and scorching desert sun. According to FIFA rules, the play should stop when conditions become unbearable. They let inflation rise as they cannot control cartels-as some of them are the cartels, nor can they enact laws to protect the voters, nor can they reason as mature people should, or why would enough oil be in the country but untraceable, when we have an able Energy Minister, and a President, an a Prime Minister, and the rest of them all? It’s like a ref who instead of using powers vested in him, or her, lets the game come down to a melee and broken limbs.
Apart from the nice road I enjoy on my way from Mombasa to Nairobi, I have nothing else to praise. They have made us susceptible and feeling hollow like the death-eaters in J.K. Rowling masterpiece, the Harry Potter series. Just as Didier Drogba said to that Swedish referee two years ago when he prevented them (Chelsea) from progressing to the UEFA finals in favour of Barcelona, “You are a f****** disgrace”.
Just like the lot we have.
