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{
    "id": 1476250,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/1476250/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 163,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Hon. Kipchumba Murkomen",
    "speaker_title": "The Cabinet Secretary for Youth Affairs, Creative Economy and Arts",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 440,
        "legal_name": "Onesimus Kipchumba Murkomen",
        "slug": "kipchumba-murkomen"
    },
    "content": "So, I am happy we have an election day. We now have the elections board, which is part of the regulations of the FKF law. I am going to have a meeting with the Board to see if we can lend them neutral Government facilities to operate their elections from and whether we can also find ways of supporting them technically with the Independent Elections and Boundaries Commission (IEBC), so that the elections are as transparent as possible. That is the conversation we are having. The stakeholders are busy now. The candidates are busy campaigning. We desire to deliver credible elections. We know that it is not the Government per se that is in charge of the elections. However, our oversight responsibility and the Office of the Registrar is working very hard to make sure that, that independence is achieved. We really want a properly working FKF that has the credibility and the confidence of the stakeholders so that football can reach the stature that the people of Kenya want it to reach. I promise that I will make sure that we deal with that. On the grassroots football support, again, apart from the Kenya Academy of Sports not having resources to deal with those academies in different places, sports are a private undertaking. Let us first make that clear. Sports are a private venture. They are like a business. We look at sports from a business perspective. Unless you are competing on behalf of your country, sports are a private business. We must see it as a business. We want to support sports in the same way that we support other businesses like micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) as a country. That is why we must have multiple ways of achieving success in sports. The best grassroots entities for developing sports are schools. We want to sit down as a Ministry to make sure that schools provide opportunities for nurturing talent. Club football should be outrightly private. Clubs should raise resources, run their football programmes, generate funding and advertise their talent. When it comes to nurturing talent, if we focus on schools alone, no part of Kenya will be left out. However, if we only focus on building training grounds, very few facilities can be constructed in the country. Recently, when the National Olympic Committee of Kenya (NOCK) was reviewing our country's performance during the Paris Olympics, I was shown statistics that universities in the United States of America contributed 3,000 athletes who competed in the Olympics. In contrast, our universities in Kenya did not contribute even one athlete. Our primary school and secondary school sports programmes are okay. We support those programmes through sports funding, and they produce the best sportspeople. After high school, very few athletes compete in universities. In fact, the only sport that has managed to have that caliber of athletes is rugby. We do not have proper programmes in our colleges and universities for other sports such as football and athletics. I promised that we would strengthen education through our sports policy. In other countries, the department of sports is called the ministry of education and sports because linking them together makes it possible for us to nurture talent. We need to work with schools for equality and equity. The other question raised by Hon. Raso is on being strategic. That is why we are only constructing one stadium per region. You are right that there is no single stadium in the entire north eastern region. We will use the principle of affirmative action to construct one in that region. The talent is there. We will ensure that every region is taken care of before we can move to counties. We will leave the county governments and the private sector to construct the rest of the stadia. The national Government should only maintain two or three stadia. The rest should either be run by the counties, the private sector or individual clubs. If we had thriving The electronic version of the Official Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor."
}