In Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, he talks about the lizard that jumped from a high Iroko tree to the ground. Seeing no one had applauded it for the feat, the lizard praised himself by nodding the head.
Similarly, Moses Magogo’s machinated plot to become the sole candidate for the Fufa presidency has been met with deafening silence from football stakeholders but that has not stopped him from embarking on a spree of self-promotion as a popular person.
He may have succeeded in disenfranchising rivals through bribery and intimidation but he will pay the price ultimately when the sham electoral process is exposed.
You wonder why Magogo, if he is truly loved in football, moves with police escorts and non-uniformed gangs for protection. One just only needs to look at what happened at the Uganda Netball Federation (UNF) polls to understand that Magogo and his cronies are on borrowed time.
The outgoing UNF executive had hoodwinked the public for years by using Uganda’s purported qualification to major tournaments to create a ruling class of a few individuals based on patronage while hiding gross neglect of grassroots netball; but it took a bold ‘outsider’ in Sarah Babirye Kityo to shake the table and sweep out the old guard.
This is not any different from Fufa, where a cabal of earners have locked out investors and high-profile administrators through prohibitive clauses.
A few years ago, Fufa rejected the nomination to the Uganda Premier League (UPL) board of respectable people like Robert Kabushenga, Njuba and Daniel Kalinaki, among others, for fear of opening themselves to checks and balances. These are things I expected Hamson Obua, the state minister for Sports, to address when he assumed the office three years ago.
Unfortunately, he is yet to address himself in a convincing way but this can be argued that the first three years were for orientation into the murky world of sports administration where there is little room for checks and balances.
President Museveni’s decision to retain him in the position should perhaps provide Obua with a lease of life to act in the best interests of football stakeholders and bring Fufa to book, plus making football a national forex catchment area.
For example, football should not be a Kampala affair with the rest of the country governed by remote control. What happened to Boroboro FC and Akol FC from Lira, I am sure the minister is not proud of the fact that the whole of northern Uganda – where he hails from – has no football team in the top two tiers of domestic football.
So, now that he has a new mandate in the ministry, it is time to act and tackle football injustices without fear or favour. I can forgive him for naivety leading the celebrations to mark Magogo’s return from a ban after the World Cup tickets scandal but history will judge him harshly for looking on as the game goes to the dogs.
His predecessors such as Maj Amanya Mushega and Namirembe Bitamazire were swift in putting to order or removing incompetent football leaders.
But here we are under Obua, where he looks on as one man comfortably chairs the National Council of Sports and is also the president of Uganda Olympic Committee. Does this need rocket science to know there is a conflict of interest?
In all, let me count the first three years as an orientation period but there will be no excuses if Obua becomes an acquaintance to the unethical practices that continue to bedevil our sports.
