Former Football Kenya Federation president Nick Mwendwa.
It may be hard to see how far former Football Kenya Federation (FKF) president Nick Mwendwa has fallen, but not if you’ve been an avid follower of Kenyan football. His exit from Kandanda House is being viewed by many as a momentous event, bringing to an end one of the most rueful regimes the country has ever seen.
Mwendwa, a showboating character whose pride and ego preceded him, believed he would occupy the highest seat in Kenyan football forever, and only leave when he wanted to. But in the end, he lost fair and square in an election one year later after his attempts to extend his term in office were opposed by vigilant football fans, and thwarted by the courts.
He ferried a significant number of the 90 delegates to the voting venue in matching Subaru cars in a show of might on the day of the election. However, Mwendwa, who was the running mate of Doris Petra, still lost to Hussein Mohammed 43 to 31 votes in the first round, and again in the runoff where Hussein was declared the winner after crossing the 50 per cent threshold with 67 votes.
His move to concede defeat on the spot and shake hands with Hussein was perhaps Mwendwa’s first sign of humility since he was elected to office nine years ago, but it is not difficult to see why.
In the last nine years, Mwendwa, an IT professional and an entrepreneur, had made so many enemies that by the time his bandwagon began moving backwards, it was difficult for him to determine which among his foes was persecuting him.
Checkmate
Many journalists had fallen victim to his intimidation tactics. Corporates didn’t want to touch the sport with a 10-foot pole due to lack of financial accountability.
Club owners saw him as part of the reason the top-flight league had regressed and fans were aggrieved by the fact that he never saw them as an important cog in the machinery of Kenyan football. Therefore, when he failed to gain the support of the government in this election, it was game over. Checkmate!
Looking back at his nine-year reign, it is evident that Mwendwa failed to read the winds of change and proved to be a surprisingly naive politician while pretending to be a non-politician.
Adjectives like young, clever, knowledgeable, and charismatic were used to describe him when he took over office on February 10, 2016, but he has now left disgraced, as a man who gave empty promises, promoted himself tirelessly, never admitted to being in the wrong, and ignored resentments until it was too late.
Like we do when all ‘great men’ transition to ventures anew, now is the time to analyse the ‘legacy’ of the regime of Team Change (as they branded their campaign machinery in the last two elections) and shed light on the outgoing administration’s contributions to Kenyan football.
Sure, Mwendwa’s administration had its high moments. He was in charge when Kenya qualified for the 2019 Africa Cup of Nations after 15 long years.
He ensured regular assignments for the different national teams. Several sponsors, many of them betting firms, spent their money on football during the first years of his tenure. He sustained the Women’s Premier League and the National Super League despite some challenges.
But, for all of that, what do the vapour trails say? There goes yet another unpopular, error-prone FKF president.
First on his long list of mistakes was to increase the number of teams in the Kenyan Premier League to 18 from 16.
This was a unilateral decision he made just a few days after his election in February 2016, against the wishes of club owners, league managers, and broadcast sponsors, SuperSport, then later failed to honour his promise of paying Sh38 million every season to cater for the two extra teams.
Match-fixing
Of the three, only SuperSport saw the decision for what it was – the first sign of a terrible character flaw. The South Africa-based pay TV channel responded by terminating their contract and left in a huff, citing breach of contract, leaving hundreds of Kenyans jobless and Kenyan football in the dark.
Because of this darkness, some referees – whose earnings were directly impacted by the reduced revenues in the national league following SuperSport’s exit – began getting clever. Match fixing reared its ugly head in all leagues, and several players and referees were either suspended or arrested for trying to manipulate the outcome of league matches.
While this was happening. Mwendwa was engaging in loose talk. At a press conference about three months after his election, he publicly announced that he would resign if Kenya failed to host the 2018 Africa Nations Cup (CHAN).
When the expected happened and Kenya was stripped of the hosting rights of the tournament due to lack of proper stadiums, he repudiated and said he was going nowhere.
Those who reminded him of his declaration to resign were branded enemies. In Mwendwa’s world, all uncomfortable questions were malicious and anyone who dared ask difficult questions was an enemy.
To control dissent, or perhaps to stifle it altogether, many journalists and even ordinary fans were either barred from attending press conferences, ejected from pressers and matches, or denied accreditation to FKF events.
In January this year, new FKF boss Hussein Mohammed was a victim of this high-handedness when he was roughed up and almost ejected from the stands early during a grassroots match at Raila Odinga Stadium in Homa Bay County.
It took the intervention of Homa Bay Governor Gladys Wanga, who was also present in the game, for sanity to prevail.
Those who know him say Mwendwa cultivated this arrogance during his days managing his club, Kariobangi Sharks.
There, he was king. He played all roles. It was not unusual for him to jump from his seat and storm the touchline during a Sharks match to issue instructions to players whenever he felt the coach wasn’t doing enough.
To his detriment, he brought this approach to national football management, and worse, he surrounded himself with yes-men who always nodded along to his ideas.
The same year, he was elected for the first time, the National Executive Council met and decided to purchase an Outside Broadcasting Van using a Fifa grant worth Sh135 million.
Highest paid
It made both logical and economical sense at the time since Super Sport had abruptly terminated its relationship with the local league. Now, nine years later, the van has never been seen.
It never even arrived in Kenya. And this is just one among many instances where FKF found itself battling allegations of misuse of funds.
When Harambee Stars qualified for the 2019 Afcon, FKF faced hard questions again, as some Sh244 million granted to them by the government to prepare for the continental football showpiece was irregularly spent.
It later emerged that Mwendwa ferried dozens of his staff, including his assistant, to the tournament in Cairo using taxpayers’ money.
As president, he was the highest-paid official during that tour, receiving Sh50,000 in daily allowances for the entire duration of the tournament, while his deputy, Doris Petra, collected Sh45,000 daily.
Further, the federation paid OneGoal Pro agency Sh106 million to cater for expenses incurred by Harambee Stars during their pre-Afcon camp in France. OneGoal Pro was owned by Cameroonian Joe Kamga, who was at that time Harambee Stars coach Sebastien Migne’s agent. This was a clear case of conflict of interest.
In their financial documents, FKF indicated that they had played three friendly matches as part of their preparations for Afcon, which cost some Sh63 million.
This was not entirely true, as the team only played two friendly matches - against Congo and Madagascar.
Curiously, none of the documents tabled in parliament and at the Ministry of Sports showed that the federation had received some Sh77 million from Caf and online betting firm Betin for use at the tournament.
That was not all.
A financial report that FKF presented to Parliament and seen by Nation Sport that same year indicated that Sh18 million from the government grant was channelled towards preparing the Under 20 national team for an Olympic qualifier. The amount had been allocated towards preparing Stars to compete in a friendly match against Togo that never took place.
When these findings came to light, things began falling apart. At first, then Sports Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohammed tolerated Mwendwa and his acolytes, as most diplomats do.
But when his arrogance continued unabated and the noise became too much, Amina and then Sports Principal Secretary Kirimi Kabreria began limiting funds available for Mwendwa’s use from the ministry, and once denied completely funding a national team’s trip to Egypt, alleging that Mwendwa had failed to account for monies given to him for previous national team assignments.
He went to the media hoping to arm-twist Amina and get support from politicians higher up the political structure.
The CS responded by disbanding the FKF Secretariat, which marked the beginning of the end for Mwendwa.
To his relief, Amina was transferred from the ministry a few months later, and, to nobody’s surprise, the case against Mwendwa fizzled out before collapsing entirely, with the authorities citing lack of enough evidence.
The worst part was that Kenya was banned by Fifa due to government interference and spent a year in the cold.
Left with no choice, former Sports Cabinet Secretary Ababu Namwamba, who was keen to hit the ground running at the ministry, reinstated the disbanded FKF secretariat.He bounced back with even more arrogance.
He tried to extend his term of office by persuading delegates to change FKF Constitution, but this only served to alienate him further from stakeholders.
Cases began piling both in the High Court and at the Sports |Disputes Tribunal challenging both his eligibility to vie for office a third term and his position as the head of a NEC that had been irregularly reinstated after being legally disbanded.
This time, the courts, the SDT and the Sports Registrar all united and declared him unfit to vie for a third term, leaving him with no choice but to exit the race for FKF president. But he had one more card up his sleeve.
He propped up his deputy, Doris Petra, to be the presidential candidate for this year’s race, and he became his running mate, to ensure he remained on the ballot. The result was the resounding defeat last Saturday that is still reverberating across football circles.
With all this in mind, Kenyan football bids farewell to this football administrator. He is living proof of what overconfidence does to a man. He excelled in uniting the masses against himself and rubbed everyone the wrong way.
And even when he was saying the right things, his voice made the wrong noise. His defeat shows that even the most corrupt delegates know where to draw the line.
“The only regret I have is that the fellas will never be brought to book over the loss of funds as well as the Sh1.5 billion Chan 2018 mess that they orchestrated with Auditel Spain in cahoots with Auditel Kenya and Ministry of Sports officials. I hope that the EACC file number EACC/FI/INQ/35/2021 remains alive for years,” says Robin Toskin, who was a member of the Caretaker Committee that ran football when the NEC was disbanded in 2022.
As a boy from “Bangu” (Kariobangi), Mwendwa has helped demonstrate how much youth, academic, and entrepreneurial achievement – buttressed by class privilege – can breed a dangerously overinflated sense of self-worth.
In Kenya, much like in the rest of the world, we have a habit of creating folklore out of very ordinary people who get some education despite coming from poor backgrounds once they get a job that catapults them to the national spotlight. We conflate those academic and entrepreneurial achievements with superhuman prowess.
So, farewell and adios, Mwendwa. You came, you saw and you left your mark on the country. On all football lovers, and not in a good way.
In another world, you would have been forced into bearing some responsibility for the mess you leave behind, but we are not a moralistic society and so there will be something for you and your cronies in some unknown bank accounts full of money that should have paid for the training of more coaches, or the improved performance of Harambee Stars.
You were a big man, and now you are not, but you are still a child of our time.
