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Negritude is a mighty fine thing, but will it help us host an Olympics in Africa?

Monday August 29 2016

Which country in sub-Saharan Africa, apart from South Africa, can host the Olympics? The question sneaked into my mind while watching the sporting extravaganza in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

Hosting such an event, no doubt, comes with a huge financial cost. But it is also the one occasion where the host country invites the world to celebrate its technological and cultural civilisation — sort of a country’s equivalent of a coming-of-age party.

No one out of the millions who watched the games on TV, or the thousands who flew to Rio, would not now acknowledge that Brazil, for decades considered part of the so-called developing world, had arrived.

Yes, we all knew of its economic accomplishments, we had read of its exponential GDP growth and its beautiful cities.

But all this, after all, was abstract knowledge. The Games afforded us an up-close-and-personal encounter with Brazil. We looked in envy at state-of-the art stadia, the sparkling golf and cycling courses, the classic handball arenas, the beautiful modern city streets, and, above all, the spectacular vistas afforded by engineering and planning befitting a country at the cutting edge of 21st century development.

There was something else, too, that was equally profound: The seamless organisation of the Games, symbolised by the breathtaking opening and closing ceremonies.

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Now, we know that the narrative of Brazil Rising has substance. Now, when we meet a Brazilian, our attitude will be one of utmost respect.

Can Africa host the Olympics? The answer, though at first not recognisable as such, was all the while trickling down to us in news reports about the management of Kenya’s Olympics team.

No matter how many times we are hit by these scandals — whether they are of theft of public money or ineptitude — their scale and blatancy always shocks. Remember how a government connived with a conman to defraud the country of billions of shillings in the Goldenberg corruption scandal? Or the Anglo-Leasing scandal in which the government again facilitated theft of billions?

There was also the grabbing of a playing field belonging to a primary school and when the children protested, they were teargassed unconscious. Then there was the blatant robbery at the National Youth Service, and the clearing of individuals who later turned to be key suspects by the official anti-corruption body.

After every one of these scandals, we shake our heads in utter disbelief at not just the scale of the transgression, but also its callousness. After every one of these scandals, we hang our heads in shame.

Now, once again, our jaws fell in disbelief as more and more details of the gross misconduct of officials in charge of the Kenya Olympics team reached us. Chaos at the athletes’ village. Star athlete Julius Yego having to travel to Nairobi by road. Athletes with only one change of the kits sponsored by Nike because the others were missing. Some coaches missing their tickets to Rio, etc.

Meanwhile, officials from the various sports associations and the Ministry of Sports, their girlfriends and cronies were living it up in Rio. This last scenario reminded us of an episode after the Garissa terrorist attack in which the Minister of Security and the police chief hopped onto a helicopter and left the Recce anti-terror squad behind!

In response to the Rio fiasco, the ridiculously inept Minister in charge of Sports, Hassan Wario, lamented that he, too, was a victim of the cartels running sports in Kenya. By any standards, even our tragi-comedic ones, Mr Wario should not be in office.

So there, in shocking details of ineptitude, theft, arrogance and callousness, was the answer to my question. If we cannot organise a scandal-free trip for a group of athletes to the Olympics, the only place where we recover some of the national pride battered by the political class, what are the chances that we can manage an undertaking as complex as an Olympics?

Wole Soyinka, in his critique of Negritude, the philosophy championed by Leopold Sedar Senghor that propagated the mystique of the black race, memorably said that “The tiger does not announce its tigritude, it pounces.”

Yet even today, African intellectual expression keeps painting a picture of an innocent Africa kept down by evil neo-colonial forces. While we are lulled to dreamland by such an untruth, the African political class and officialdom daily demean us and make us the laughing stock of the world.

Why don’t we, like Brazil, instead describe ourselves by accomplishment, not by nostalgic poetry about Africa this and Africa that?

Tee Ngugi is a social and political commentator based in Nairobi. E-mail: [email protected]

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