Wario enforces Sports Act
The Government on Thursday banned all sports organizations that had yet to conform to the Sports Act from accomplishing their mandate.
In a move aimed at improving the management of sports in the country, Cabinet Secretary for Sports, Culture and the Arts Hassan Wario also imposed economic sanctions on the disciplines that had not met these requirements.
“All affected Sports Organizations should therefore not participate in any National, Regional and International Competitions. They should not also be eligible for funding support especially from the Exchequer through the Ministry of Sports, Culture and the Arts,” Wario declared in a paid up newspaper advert in the Daily Nation.
This development if enforced, looks set to paralyze almost 90 percent of all sports activities in the country. The affected organizations however have an unspecified window of time to toe the line.
‘BANNED’
Wario’s announcement sent immediate panic across the local sports fraternity, as officials affiliated to most of the ‘banned’ thronged the Sports Registrar’s office located at the NSSF towers in Nairobi to collect the registration forms.
Other bodies including the Kenya Table Tennis Association (KTTA) asked for more time to complete the process.Football Kenya Federation (FKF), Athletics Kenya (AK), Kenya Hockey Union (KHU), Kenya Premier League Ltd (KPL) and the Kenya Rugby Union are some of the oragnizations that are yet to conform to the act.
“We will flush out and expose all those so called administrators who have been running sports activities in this country as if it was their personal property,” a senior official in the concerned Ministry told Nairobi News.
At the same time, a number of senior sports administrators risk being locked out of management as they may not meet the strict criterion as stipulated in the Sports Act.
These include seeking clearance from the Ethics and Anti Corruption (EACC), Criminal Investigations Department (CID), Higher Educations Loans Board (HELB) and the Credit Bureau.