– Sam Dilliway –
I’m very sad to hear the news about the violence in Tana River, just up the coast from where we are, near to Somalia. Over the past two weeks we have seen it explained as being conflict over land between pastoralists, but with the death toll now topping one hundred, the arrest of prominent MP and Assistant Livestock Minister Dhadha Godhana, and comment being made from the US, there is another story emerging; this violence has tribalism at its roots, and is being perpetrated with the 2013 presidential elections in mind.
As we have travelled across Kenya the past two months, we have frequently discussed the 2007/8 post-election violence, and found there to be widespread belief that the root causes of that violence have not been eradicated, and fear that the next elections, which were due to be in the autumn in 2012 but have been postponed to March 2013, will also see a considerable amount of conflict along tribal lines between people who ordinarily live alongside each other in peace.
It’s in this context that I wonder about the capability of sports to be used as a tool for peace: Can Sports be used for Peacebuilding? It’s a question that I’ve been asking throughout my research this summer, but here I see a concrete situation in the not too distant future looming. In Kenya we have met with organisations that have experience ranging from twenty-five years, all the way down to just two years. Each of these organisations felt helpless to intervene the last time around, and indeed often had their programmes interrupted because of security concerns. There were some interesting small-scale interventions, such as tournaments arranged post-conflict to bring people together, and a trauma recovery program that was initiated and run on an ad-hoc basis on several occasions, but it seems there were not any SDP programs in operation at that time that were planned and co-ordinated with any experience or training in peace work or peacebuilding.
I wonder if the GIZ YDF program on violence prevention might be able to do anything about this? It’s new, having only been finished late last year, and we know of four organisations in the country who have facilitators trained in South Africa to train coaches in the Violence Prevention through Football program. From our research we learned these programs are now just starting out in Nairobi, while one program on the coast started implementing it over the past few months.
Can a football program play any serious role among the many needed for violence prevention? Can it become a necessary element alongside a wider set of interventions such as mediation and negotiation? The important difference here is that SDP programs attract young people who enjoy sports, and predominantly operate at the grassroots level.
Common Kenyan opinion is that during election periods violence is directly instigated by wealthy politicians motivated to increase their chances at gaining a political seat and thereby gaining access to the nation’s riches. Their strategy is to incite tribal divisions by paying poorly educated, unemployed young people to attack citizens from other tribes. But who are these poorly educated renegades? Are such young people included in football projects run by organisations such as MYSA, VAP, TIA Hope and Moving the Goalposts? Can these football projects have such a strong impact as to change perceptions and create relationships between participants across all economic and tribal lines that are strong enough to discourage repeating the 2007/8 violence come the 2013-election? Specific research on this is interesting, necessary and timely.
My mind stirs as I write this because we were recently told by an organization that the GIZ funding for the YDF violence prevention program was due to come to an end shortly, and they were unaware if it would continue, thus the program at the height of its demand faces imminent discontinuation. It seems to me this is the critical time to increase funding given the current need for peacebuilding projects before the election. And, since these programs are newly established, finding supplemental funding overnight would be a real challenge.