Kenya look likely to be expelled from the 2022 Fifa World Cup qualifiers before a game is played, having told the BBC they do not have the funds to meet a payment deadline – the result of which will be their immediate exclusion from the competition.
Kenya’s football federation, the FKF, have said they are unable to pay former coach Adel Amrouche a million dollars by Friday 24 April, as they were ordered to by the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS) last October.
They have been told by Fifa, world football’s governing body, that if they do not make this payment, the result will be exclusion from the World Cup qualifying campaign unless Amrouche agrees to an extension of the deadline.
But Amrouche has already told the BBC that he will not agree to any extension.
“It is not the end of the world to be out of the 2022 World Cup qualifiers,” FKF President Nick Mwendwa said.
“We don’t have money and with the Covid-19 situation we have players who are stuck right now who haven’t been paid salaries.
“It’s been deaf ears from government – which is understandable because there is a crisis.”
The issue stems from the ruling by the CAS that Amrouche was wrongfully dismissed back in 2014 when he was sacked 18 months into a five-year tenure, following a 1-0 aggregate loss to Lesotho in a 2015 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier.
Amrouche initiated legal action that culminated in the million dollar award last October, to be paid by Friday 24 April 2020.
But with that deadline approaching, the FKF asked Fifa for an extension – only to be told “they cannot do much unless the creditor (Adel Amrouche) accepts.”
Amrouche, however, told the BBC that he is not open to the idea of any extension.
“Agreement on extension would lead to the closure of the disciplinary proceedings without payment being guaranteed,” he said.
For his part, Mwendwa said the FKF are “telling our people there’s so much more football beyond the World Cup qualifiers that we can play.”
Kenya has never participated in the Fifa World Cup, but having featured at the 2019 Afcon there was optimism this this group of players they could make it out of Group E, in which they are placed with Mali, Uganda and Rwanda.
28-year-old captain, former Spurs midfielder Victor Wanyama, would be the most high-profile of those to miss out.
Competing in a World Cup also comes with financial benefits – reaching the finals in Qatar alone comes with a $9.5million reward before a ball is kicked, money that the FKF could certainly benefit from with its finances currently in the red.
Kenya facing World Cup expulsion
Berlin Marathon September date off and no word on rescheduling
The Berlin Marathon, along with London one of the sport’s six ‘majors’, will not go ahead as planned on 27 September after Germany extended a ban on large-scale gatherings until 24 October.
In a short statement organizers said the event “cannot take place” as scheduled, without specifying whether a postponement was possible. They would “co-ordinate further steps”, they said.
The Berlin race was scheduled to take place the weekend before the London Marathon’s rearranged date of 4 October. The London Marathon, originally due to take place this Sunday, was postponed amid the coronavirus outbreak.
A rearranged Berlin marathon would probably have to take place in mid-November at the earliest, given the New York marathon is to be staged on 1 November. The Berlin race, famous for its fast course, has been the scene of the past seven men’s marathon world records, most recently Eliud Kipchoge’s two hours one minute 39 seconds in 2018.
Last year, Kenenisa Bekele, who is due to go up against Kipchoge at London this year, won in 2:01:41 – the second fastest time in history. Germany has suffered fewer coronavirus deaths than the UK – 4,948 compared to 17,337 according to figures collated by John Hopkins University – and has already begun a partial lifting of its lockdown measures.
Coronavirus how it hit football finance in Africa
Just four months into 2020, the coronavirus pandemic has swept across the planet, obliterating sports events and forcing suspensions, postponements and outright cancellations.
A sporting calendar that promised so much – including the Olympics, Africa Women’s Cup of Nations, European Championships, African Athletics championship, the CHAN tournament – has instead become a series of blank weeks and months as event after event succumbed to postponements and cancellations.
The end of live sport around the world has meant that players, coaches, clubs and federations have seen money dry up. Across Africa this has presented many challenges. Here, we look at those affecting football in particular.
”Football is life – the moment football stops, it is like life has stopped too”, laments David Juma, captain of Kakamega Homeboyz in Kenya’s Premier League.
For all that football is Africa’s most popular sport, the passion does not easily translate to an attractive bank balance even in normal times in comparison to leagues across Europe and America.
According to the KPL – one of East Africa’s top football leagues – 50% of its footballers earn an average monthly salary of $200. This leaves most players dependent on match bonuses, travelling allowance and winning bonuses.
Without games to play, none of these can be secured. Added to this has been the exit of league sponsors SportPesa.
And other players in the KPL do not earn a monthly wage at all, and earn by having jobs with the company that owns the club. In the pandemic, most of those companies are themselves struggling.
“We were told we will take a 50% pay cut – our boss is also in business, and because of corona there is no business that is doing well,” Juma continues.
“As a businessman, he knew paying our full salaries was unsustainable – so this was instead of sending away people unpaid.”
The structural threat of poverty and inequality to the Arab Region
continued from last week
Arab governments and their external sponsors tend to prioritize the wrong threats. Most Arab governments continue to introduce superficial reforms in pivotal sectors such as education, employment, and anti-corruption, but their efforts mostly remain unsuccessful or limited in their impact. Simultaneously, the broader Arab trend in most countries since the end of the Cold War around 1990 sees steadily increasing pauperisation, vulnerability, perceived injustice and helplessness, and disparities.
Long-term, cross-generational poverty now seems inevitable for families that suffer short-term setbacks in their income, because most Arab states are unable to generate the new decent jobs or provide the social services required to pull poor and vulnerable families out of their miserable condition. Recent studies indicate that the Middle East is the most unequal region in the world, with the top 10 percent of its people accounting for 61 percent of wealth, compared to 47 percent in the United States and 36 percent in Western Europe. Inequalities are documented in virtually every sector of life and society, including rural/urban, gender, income, ethnicity, and others, suggesting that this has become a deeply engrained structural problem rather than a fleeting phenomenon due to short-term economic stresses.
Poverty, vulnerability, and inequality have converged into a single dynamic that is deeply anchored in existing economic realities and state policy deficiencies that show no signs of changing appreciably, and consequently they will be difficult to reverse in the short term. The 2018 ESCWA and Economic Research Forum report indicated that some Arab countries, including Egypt, have even reversed decades-old recent trends and registered a rise in fertility rates in the past five years, which will increase the demographic pressures on economic and social systems that have been unable to keep pace with population growth even when fertility rates were declining in recent decades. According to the report, an estimated nine million Arabs are born every year, nearly two million in Egypt alone, all of whom will need education, health services, housing, water, and jobs that the Arab states already are unable to provide to the existing population.
Beyond the pain that this situation brings to poor and vulnerable families is the additional dangers that societies suffer, such as fragmentation, political instability, social, class, and sectarian tensions, citizen alienation from the state, and sometimes political violence, criminality, or illegal migration. External powers have done little to address these massive social and economic problems, and in most cases have supported regime policies which make them worse.
Jordan offers a timely example of how social, economic, and political stresses on families lead to wider tensions in society, ultimately generating serious splits between citizens and their state. From the late 1990s to 2018, for example, Jordanians significantly increased their perceptions of injustice and inequality in their lives, especially their treatment by the state and its institutions. Data from polls by the respected local consultancy NAMA, directed by Dr. Fares Braizat, shows those who say that justice does not exist in their lives increased from 8 to 24 percent in that period, and the perception of inequality increased from 10 to 30 percent.
These sentiments are especially high in rural areas and among those who migrated from rural to urban centers in recent decades; most of these citizens depend on state employment or other state-related income, have not benefited from private sector investments or jobs, and increasingly in recent decades have found themselves unable to meet their basic family needs. Polls by NAMA and the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan reveal some disturbing trends in family-level economic and political distress, including the critical perceptions of injustice that seem to be a crucial driver of anti-government protests.
Jordanians who see no justice in their lives increased from 40 to 46 percent in just the four months between June and September 2018, two-thirds of citizens feel the country is moving in the wrong direction, 72 percent of households said they could not meet their basic expenses, compared to 42 percent in mid-2011, and two-thirds of households reported their economic situation is worse than it was a year ago. The inability to meet basic household needs, or barely to do so but without being able to save any money, is also mirrored in regional polls by the Arab Barometer and the Doha-based Arab Center for Research and Policy Studies, both of whose pan-Arab surveys indicate around 70-75 percent of families cannot afford to pay for their most basic needs.
Protests in the past year in Jordan and across the entire Arab region including Sudan, Algeria, Iraq, Tunisia, Lebanon, and other lands, indicate fact that citizens are stressed by a debilitating combination of political and socio-economic factors in their lives. Many suffer from precarious socio-economic conditions as well as their lack of political power to address compelling issues like corruption, political accountability of the elite, and being treated with disdain by their state. The most dramatic example of the latter was the desire of the Algerian ruling elite to nominate President Abdelaziz Bouteflika for a fifth consecutive term, despite his near comatose physical and mental state, which makes a mockery of the presidential election being an opportunity for citizens to voice their political views.
Rami Khouri of American University of Beirut stated that these powerful internal forces of discontent and public protest by large numbers of citizens across almost the entire Arab region have already started to impact on their states’ foreign policies and international relations, in several ways. In many situations where millions of citizens suffer sustained poverty and marginalization that leads to alienation from their state and society, large numbers of them (especially unemployed young men) join the reservoirs of vulnerable people who are easily recruited into militias, terror groups, and other organizations that impact both domestic calm and foreign relations.
In some cases discontented citizens mobilize to vent their anger at their countries’ policies towards Israel, as happened in Jordan in 2018, when the King succumbed to public pressure and rescinded a clause in the 2004 peace agreement with Israel that allowed Israel to maintain control of a few patches of Jordanian land in the Jordan Valley. Turbulent conditions triggered by large numbers of dissatisfied citizens also prompt many of the best educated among them to emigrate, thus depriving the country of precisely the youthful talent and energy it needs to overcome its lingering socio-economic stagnation and political stresses.
Finally, when governments increase and harden security controls on their citizens in order to ensure “stability”, as many Arab countries have done since 2011, the result is usually the opposite. Popular discontent rises, the ruling elite expands its powers and clientelist networks, economies lumber along without significant new growth or investments, the state relies more and more on external security and financial support to survive, and the cycle of pent-up discontent that exploded in the 2010-11 uprisings starts to build again. This should prompt scholars of international relations, along with the ruling elites of the Arab states in question, to examine more closely the worsening internal conditions of these countries, especially the mindsets of hundreds of millions of citizens whose attitudes and actions ultimately will determine the fate of their societies and the direction of the entire region.
