South Sudan’s President Salva Kiir Mayardit has urged the other peace partners to unveil their flag bearers in preparation for general elections.

In December 2022, Kiir’s party, the Sudan People’s Liberation Movement (SPLM), endorsed him as its chairman and, by extension, presidential candidate in the vote. Kiir has been in office for over a decade.

In August last year, Kiir, First Vice President and opposition leader Riek Machar, and other political leaders announced the extension of the transitional government’s time in office for another two years, meaning general elections would be held in December 2024.

The current transitional coalition government was formed under a 2018 revitalised peace agreement.

Kiir, who was addressing a crowd of citizens at Freedom Square in Aweil town of Northern Bahr el Ghazal State on Tuesday, said it was high time the other political parties who are signatories to the peace agreement settle on their presidential candidates.

“I want all of you to be ready for the elections, and every party has its prepared fighting bull, and I am one of them.  And the contestants must expose themselves so that they can be seen clearer, and when the time comes, we will meet in the field,” Kiir said.

The South Sudanese leader underscored that there will be no more transitional governments after the peace roadmap that was signed by the parties. He appealed to the parties to the peace agreement to help implement the roadmap.

“How many transitional governments have we formed so far? That is not good and by the end of this roadmap, we must go for the elections, and any person who loses the elections must not blame anyone. He/she must go home, and the one who wins shall go ahead with his government,” he said.

“We have held the elections once before our secession from Sudan, and I want all of you to be ready for the elections…Peace implementation is going well, and if there is something that is not done much, it does mean that there is no interest in implementing it. We are working on it, and the roadmap we are implementing now was made by all parties to the agreement,” he added.

Separately, President Salva Kiir warned local communities in Northern Bahr al Ghazal State from the use of girls as a source of wealth rather than sending them to school.

 “We have a problem in girl child education, girl child education is important. There are people who just want the girls to be a source of wealth and cows when they grow up and the girls are not allowed to go to school. This is bad. Girls and boys have the right to go to school,” he said. - Chol Mawel, The Towerpost

By James Opondo 

Match fixing is a menace that has plagued Kenyan local sports for years. The vice came to fore in March 12^th this year, when authorities arrested 3 suspects as they tried to fix a Kenya Premier League match pitting Nairobi City Stars against Sofapaka Football Club. 

The trio Akhiad Kubiev who is a Russian, Ugandan Bernard Nabende and Kenyan Martin Munga were arrested in Nairobi following an operation involving police and footballers attached to Kenya premier league side Nairobi City Stars. The three had allegedly promised players and their manager some Kshs 1.8 million to manipulate the league match against Sofapaka on march 10th this year. The interesting bit is in the varied opinions among the Kenyan public on the arrest of match fixing suspects. 

Festo Omukoto who in 2020 was among the four locally based players banned by the world football governing body FIFA from/for taking part in match fixing was key to the police operation as he was the link to the fixers. Omukoto explained that the fixers engaged him for one month asking him to connect them with City Stars players. 

“Match fixing ruined my career and continues to destroy our football. I did not want the players to go through what I underwent,” said Omukoto. 

Speaking during the raid, the Nairobi City Stars CEO Patrick Korir said that when he was contacted by Omukoto about the matter, he called the police after organizing with seven of his players to lay a trap for the fixers. 

“I have spoken about it before but people take it (match fixing being rampant in FKF-PL) for granted. I am glad we can now put faces to the noise we have been making,” said Korir. 

Let me take it back a little bit because this incident is not the first in Kenya. Why is it rampant and how is FIFA dealing with the issue of match fixing that is killing the sports? The argument is Kenyan footballers have become so vulnerable to match fixing for just one reason- Kenyan football does not pay. Those taking this direction are somehow right because football clubs in Kenya never pay their players in time or sometimes the players plus staff go for months without pay. This results in players going hungry and some failing to pay their rent. 

Without food on the table, most of these players who entirely depend on their monthly salaries and bonuses from the clubs would simply and happily throw away a match for some extra money. Kenyans generally fancy corruption. Graft is a vice that you can simply put to someone in an argument and they tell you, its normal. The bad news about the vice is that it is here to stay so for as long as these players will get the opportunity to fix a match to be paid, they will simply do it as we are students of our leaders. 

Let’s go back to the trio fixers who were nabbed by the police in Nairobi. They were released on a Kshs 300,000 bond with two sureties of a similar amount. But what are the FIFA rules? As stated in its Statutes, FIFA’s objectives include “preventing all methods or practices, such as corruption, doping or match manipulation, which might jeopardise the integrity of matches, competitions, players, officials and member associations or give rise to abuse of association football.“ The only thing FIFA does is to ban for life or for a period but this as many argue will no help in ending the vice. Various stakeholders in Kenya are now asking the national assembly to consider match fixing a criminal offense. 

Most of the matches never make it to the television screens. There are mummers that this lack of visibility may silently abet match fixing even among compromised referees. With the fixers on the offensive, cash starved players and corrupt authorities who are ever ready for a bribe; it may take years or ever forever to purge match fixing from Kenyan pitches because of the wide net of cartels who yield to the crime.