By Isaack Omulo
A two-page spread story appearing in the Sunday Standard on August 4 bore the headline, “Sports face hard times over sponsorship withdrawal”.
The thrust of the weekend news feature was the effects of a government crackdown on betting companies, a scourge eating away our youth who prefer quick fixes to hard work, riches they hope to get from betting.
Betting companies are making huge profits that one of them is able to enter a shirt sponsorship with an English Premier League side and even fly them to play in Kenya this year and Tanzania last year.
One can accuse the government of interfering with private investors employing many Kenyans. But the government has identified loopholes betting companies exploit to make huge returns. Consequently, Treasury and Kenya Revenue Authority have sent their bureaucrats with demand notes.
Predictably, the firms are crying foul. In what borders on blackmail, the companies have announced their withdrawal of sponsorships of local sports federations and teams.
The Sunday Standard reported that: “Kenya Rugby Union (KRU) lost a Sh600 million five-year sponsorship deal from SportPesa. The company also cancelled its betting partnership deal with FKF. The Kenyan Premier League (KPL) also had to take a big reduction of its title sponsorships after SportPesa cut it by almost half to the current Sh259 million. Betway also stopped sponsoring Mathare United who by then was enjoying a Sh30 million a year sponsorship deal before tax increment.
“After losing Betway, Mathare United got another shirt sponsorship deal from another betting company Odi Bets but this also ended at the end of last season and the club is currently facing a financial crisis. The current impasse threatens to make the situation even worse. According to FKF President Nick Mwendwa, football stands to lose more than Sh600 million and he says that will create a catastrophic crisis.”
The media seem to be doing PR for one of the companies, known to offer junkets. The report mourned:
“SportPesa forked about Sh1.3 billion last year alone in sponsorships to boxing and football in the country. Just 26 days to go before the start of the 2019-2020 Kenyan Premier League (KPL) season, Gor Mahia and AFC Leopards, two of Kenya’s most successful clubs with 31 league titles between them, are in danger of failing to honour not only their local league matches but also their contractual obligations to players, some signed up from countries as far away as West Africa.”
By June, there were 23 betting companies registered in Kenya. The biggest, or one with the highest visibility, is Sportpesa, which says in its site that it is a Kenyan sports betting platform with operations in Kenya, Tanzania, South Africa, the Isle of Man and the UK, where it operates in conjunction with TGP Europe.
SportPesa currently has sponsorship deals with Simba SC and Young Africans SC, two leading clubs in the Tanzania Premier League. The two teams have signed five-year sponsorship deals. Additionally, SportPesa sponsored Singida United FC for a year following their promotion to the Tanzania Premier League.
In 2016, SportPesa entered into a record deal with another EPL side Hull City, since relegated, in the club’s most lucrative deal in 112 years.
The Sunday Standard report deliberately avoids the negative effects of betting on the youth, who have gone to dizzying heights to bet.
The scourge was described in the English media in 2018 as problem gambling, a debate that was touched off by the media following a proliferation of gambling companies in the country’s two top football leagues.
The reporters remarkably buried in the last paragraph this quote: “…concern continues to be raised worldwide over the growth of betting companies. Two years ago, the Football Association of England announced that it had resolved to end its relationship with betting companies following a string of high profile gambling controversies. In 2017, a poll of African millennials revealed that Kenya’s youth are the biggest gamblers in Africa.”
The State Department of Sports and Culture has a sports fund, which has a provision for a lottery to fund all sports bodies. The fund should be conducting its own betting or lottery, controlled betting under terms that don’t affect the youth in the manner that the current companies have visited upon the Kenyan youth.
The fact that the lottery has not been effected is a story for another day, a story that should interest a sports reporter with a nose for human interest investigative news. But most prefer asking mundane run-of-the-mill questions at press conferences called by the Cabinet Secretary or Principal Secretary just to make them look good and ‘on top of their game.’
This story, wittingly or unwittingly, was ignored. Some of the greatest sporting nations, like England and South Africa, derive their money to run sports from their sports lotteries that are regulated by the government, not some companies registered in tax havens and who return their huge profits to those countries that our youth don’t even know.
Instead, the report decries the loss of contributions to the sports fund. “Contributions to the sports fund are also to be hit badly. The fund which draws money from tax imposed on betting firms became operational this year and its role is to help in the funding of national teams, arts and a universal health care program launched by the government. Betting firms contributed more than Sh7 billion to the fund every year and it remains to be seen where the government will get money for this cause should the crackdown continue.”
Rather than decry what they termed as ‘hard times’ faced by local sports, the reporters should ask why the sports lottery has not started working, and when it will. They should highlight, knowing their fixation with everything and anything English, why the FA ended its relationship with betting companies.
They owe it to Kenyan youth. They should educate the youth on the pitfalls of betting away all their savings, instead of joining sports officials in decrying the withdrawal of sponsorship money, a story which could easily have been instigated by these betting companies to seek sympathy from ignorant Kenyans, or arm-twist the government to relax its.
The reporters should have interviewed experts on business of sport, like Prof Paul Ochieng, the Dean of Strathmore University, on other avenues of revenues for sports clubs and entities involved in the business of sports. How do sports entities survive in this cut throat business during these hard economic times? This would make a better read for weekend consumers of news, many who are tired of an overdose of political news.
