Sports, just like politics, is rife with electoral fraudsters

A story is told of a certain Kenyan sports administrator who once rode into office through blatant electoral malpractice which was both astounding and comical in the brazen manner it was executed.

The story goes that the said administrator, who I will not mention here by name for obvious reasons, so desperately sought reelection to his federation’s top office that he resorted to buying out delegates who were due to cast their votes. 

On the eve of the polls, the guy is reported to have laid out a sumptuous meal before the compromised delegates after which he booked them into a relatively luxurious city hotel.

But just to ensure that none of them entertained any silly thoughts of double-crossing him in the cover of darkness, he not only kept his well-fed beneficiaries under key and lock but he went as far as taking up overnight sentry duties. With the keys to the locked up rooms safely in his custody, the guy spent the night prowling the hotel lobby like a tiger on the loose.

Ultimately, his underhand tactics paid off handsomely at the ballot. He was unanimously re-elected and everybody went home ‘happy’.

As devious as this incident was, there are many more heads of sports associations and federations in this country and elsewhere in the world who have used similar, or even worse, guerrilla tactics to manipulate and defeat the democratic process that elections are supposed to be. Ever wondered why there was a time when the names of certain personalities were synonymous with certain sports federations? No, they were neither indispensable nor God’s best gift to humanity. Apparently, electoral fraud is what kept many of these characters in office for so long.

And in certain societies, like our beloved country Kenya, where people often vote with their stomachs rather than their conscience, electoral malpractice at all levels of governance has taken root so much so that it is accepted as the ‘nature’ of elections. Which is truly tragic.

But when it comes to electoral fraud in sports, the world football governing body Fifa can easily be used as a case study on ‘how to steal votes.’

During the scandal-ridden 17-year tenure of a certain Sepp Blatter, Fifa Congresses were notorious for gross electoral malpractices which involved bribery, coercion, vote-buying and even the enlistment ‘ghost voters’.

In his best-selling novel, Foul! The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote-Rigging and Ticket Scandals, British investigative journalist, Andrew Jennings (now deceased), exposed two occasions when the powers that be at Fifa were indicted of blatant vote-rigging. For some reason, in both incidents the thieving Fifa aristocracy sallied the reputation of Haiti by using proxies to cast votes in two successive Congresses that the then head of Haiti’s federation Dr Jean-Marie Kyss failed to attend.

Absurdly, in the first case in 1996, during a Fifa Congress in Zurich, a joyriding girlfriend of the then Jamaican football boss cast the ballot ‘on behalf’ of Haiti. Then two years later in Paris, another imposter from Trinidad and Tobago voted as a ‘representative’ of Haiti. It turned out that this was part of a dirty scheme that saw Blatter ascending to office at the expense of one Lennart Johansson. But we all know what eventually became of Blatter almost two decades later.

The moral of my long story? Politicians and sports administrators belong to the same WhatsApp group.