Kenyan football is a grand, high-stakes rehearsal for a play that never actually opens. We are a nation of “almosts” and “nearly-theres,” perpetually stuck in the foyer of greatness, blaming the doorman for our lack of a ticket.
We treat football like a microwave dinner in a world that demands a slow-roasted stew. We worship the result—that loud, fleeting explosion of joy—the way a child gapes at a firework. But once the smoke clears, there is only a dark sky and the smell of burnt sulfur.
Development, by contrast, is a thousand-page Russian novel with no illustrations and a very difficult protagonist. It is boring. It is quiet. It requires us to sit still. And because we have the collective attention span of a hummingbird on an espresso bender, we never make it past the preface.
Now, there is a frantic beauty in our obsession with high school tournaments. To dismiss the roar of a packed hillside watching teenagers battle for “Nationals” is to dismiss the heartbeat of the country. And while that might be true, or partly true, that these are our finest moments, we must ask: why are they our only moments?
Glorifying these tournaments isn’t the sin; the sin is treating the junction as the destination. These games are the “Jabberwocky” of our sports world—full of “vorpal swords” and “tulgey woods”—nonsense brilliance that feels epic in the moment but evaporates the second the school bell rings. We celebrate the boy who dribbles like a god at seventeen, then watch him vanish into the ether of “what happened to him?” by twenty-one.
We love these moments because they are pure. They aren’t yet corrupted by the stagnant air of our boardroom politics. They offer a glimpse of what happens when joy outruns bureaucracy. But a campfire is not a power plant; you cannot run a national industry on the nostalgia of a school rivalry.
We reach for the throat of the administrator, the referee, and the politician with the practiced ease of a Shakespearean villain. And while that might be true, or partly true, that they have failed us, our finger-pointing is merely a distraction from our own cultural allergy to discipline.
As Bertrand Russell famously noted: “The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts.” In Kenya, our football results are the “fanatics”—arrogant, loud, and final. But the process is the “wise person.” It is hesitant. It experiments. It fails in the laboratory, so it can win in the field. We hate the process because the process is a mirror; it shows us that we haven’t done the homework. We want the PhD without ever sitting for the primary exams.
The ailment isn’t a lack of talent; Kenya is a forest of unpicked fruit. The ailment is Impatience. We are trying to build a skyscraper on a foundation of digestive biscuits.
We must stop rewarding only the podiums. We must start rewarding the coach who loses a game but teaches a ten-year-old how to use his left foot. We must start celebrating the “junctions” without pretending they are the “end of the line.”
Until we learn to love the silence of the training ground as much as the roar of the final whistle, we will remain a nation of world-class ghosts.
