The Fix: Soccer and Organized Crime

by Declan Hill

  I spoke to several Ghanaian officials. They confirmed everything the players had said. In fact, they went further. One of them said, “The fixer phoned the players in their hotel room. Some of the officials listened in on the conversation using the telephone in the player’s room. [The fixer said that] he was going to give each and every player [US]$22,000 and a laptop. This is what he promised them. He [the fixer] said on the phone that they would be ‘very sorry’ if they told anyone about the deal.”

  Even with the implied threat, the Ghana officials really seem to have done a good job. They collected the names of the fixers, the numbers of the hotel rooms, and they were even ready to testify about what the fixers had offered their players. They wrote up a report for FIFA, but again the reaction of the local FIFA representative was, according to the Ghanaian officials and players, very odd. FIFA did say they would monitor the match carefully, but then they implied that the fault was with the Ghanaian players and told the team officials to remind them of the penalties for match-fixing. Then the FIFA representative refused to investigate the case and instead passed it on to the local Chinese organizing committee: the same type of people who had such a problem investigating match-fixing in their own league, the same type of people who could not figure out what happened with the two men filming the Danish team. Those same type of people listened to the complaints of the Ghanaian team officials and then said there was no point in arresting the match-fixers as, “There was no evidence they had done anything wrong.” At this point a reader may be wondering what a match-fixer has to do to get arrested in China, certainly the Ghanaians were left scratching their heads, for the fixers were allowed to leave the city.

  The score in that match? Norway 7, Ghana 2 – a gap of five goals, probably a coincidence, but exactly the score the fixers wanted to achieve.

  EPILOGUE

  THE SALVATION OF SOCCER

  On January 27, 2007, at around 11:00 p.m., Geoffrey Chege was on his knees in a street in Nairobi. Robbers had stopped his car and pulled him and his wife out. Chege was a regional director of the international aid agency Care in Nairobi. He was unarmed, and there were four men with guns around him. It was a simple robbery, no other motive: so he gave them his wallet. He offered them the keys to his car. His wife cried and begged the thieves to let them go. Her pleas seemed to have worked. The men started to walk away. And then one of them turned, put his gun to Chege’s head, and shot him. Chege died instantly.

  That same day, when I was in Nairobi, two American women were killed in a similar way. Both attacks made a few headlines, and then in the general levels of Kenyan crime, they were forgotten.

  The murderers of both Chege and the American women were purported to have come from the slums that loom over the centre of Nairobi like dark clouds. They are not pleasant places. Nairobi has a total population of three million; over half of these people are crammed into the Kibera and Mathare slums. Inside these areas, the rates of easily preventable diseases are shockingly high: tuberculosis, malaria, and AIDS affect more than 30 per cent of the population.

  This last story is about what life is like inside one of those slums. It is about a fight involving mafias, political interference, and salvation through soccer. It is about hope appearing out of darkness. I write it because I have shown you some of the murders, the bombings, the attacks that have happened over the control of international soccer. I write it because I have shown you some of the ways of bribing and corrupting the sport. I write it because I have shown you that the world’s biggest soccer tournament may have been corrupted. You might feel cynical. After all, if that is the way of the world, why fight to change it? Why bother? Corruption occurs in all things: why not in soccer? Why not simply sit down, enjoy the game, and not think about the litany of forgotten, good people who have to tried to stand up and change the game? But I write this last story because I love soccer. I write it to show the power of the beautiful game to change people both inside and outside. I write it because from one of the most unlikely places in the world, a Nairobi slum, comes a solution that offers hope for us all.

  I met Rosemary Njiru after her soccer game. Rosemary lives in the middle of the Mathare slum. She is a thirteen-year-old girl, who has a perpetual half-eaten toothpick stuck in the side of her mouth, a glint of humour in her eyes, and an old soul. Some of her former schoolmates are prostitutes; one, she claimed, began at nine years old, and with the wisdom of someone far older, she explained child prostitution to me: “Anywhere in the world that you have some people with lots of money and lots of people with no money, you will get situations like this.”

  The field where Rosemary plays soccer is right in the centre of Mathare. It is a scrap of bare earth. There are sheets of garbage, plastic bags, used toilet paper that litter one corner of the field. Rosemary plays with other girls and as they do so, drunken men stagger across the pitch. Three of the players do not have boots. It doesn’t seem to bother them as they chase the ball barefoot into the garbage. Some girls have soccer boots; two girls share a pair. One girl wears a boot on her left foot, the other wears the right one.

  Joyce Motio is another player on Rosemary’s team. She is also thirteen, and she lives in a two-room hut with her mother, who runs a tiny vegetable stall, and her three sisters. Her worst problem about Mathare? “The flying toilets. You know there are few toilets. So some people in the night, they do their thing on a piece of paper, then they throw it in the air and it lands in front of your house. It is very common.”

  I meet the two of them because they are both about to embark on an extraordinary journey. The league they play in has more than 16,000 players across Mathare, but every year a very few of them are selected to go, all expenses paid, on a trip to Norway to play in a youth soccer tournament. It is an incredible opportunity for girls who struggle to get the bus fare to get to the other side of the city. When asked, neither of them has any idea what Norway will be like: they tell me, “Just like Kenya, only colder.” In January, the trip to Norway is a long way off, and both girls have not made the team yet. The competition is stiff: more than 125 of the best girl players in Mathare struggling for sixteen places. Make the team, a child’s life can change forever. Miss it by one spot and they are back where they started.

  The two girls take me on a tour of their community, the Mathare Valley. There are thousands of tiny huts made of corrugated iron and mud. The roads are dirt tracks. There are pubs full of desperately drunken men and just desperate prostitutes. There is a long series of one-room Protestant churches: the Cathedral of Praise, the African Independent Gospel, the All Nations Gospel Church, the Redeemed Gospel Church, each of them promising heavenly salvation. However, seemingly oblivious to their lure, drunk men who have sought solace in other spirits lie all over the dirt tracks. Two things, however, are immediately clear to an outsider. The first is that every common area in the community seems to have a layer of garbage over it. The smell of fetid excrement hangs in the air like a thick, heavy, sickly jam. The second is once your nose gets used to the smell, and your eyes used to the poverty, you realize that the great majority of Mathare Valley people are just trying to make a living with as much decency and dignity as they can.

  One morning, I went to the local school where the girls go. There are tiny little crammed rooms about two by three metres, with twenty-five or thirty kids to a class. All or most of them walk there with their knapsacks and pressed uniforms. Their parents, the lucky ones, work long hours on the other side of the city to make sure their children can get the educational opportunity. Others are like Joyce’s mum, who has a little stall beside the soccer field where she sits all day selling a few meagre vegetables and fruit. When we passed by on the way to her house, we shook hands, talked a little about the girls’ prowess at soccer, then walked on. A few minutes later she came panting up to the house, hair dishevelled and sweating. She said something in Gikuyu. I didn’t understand, so Joyce translated.

  “My mother invites you to our home and wants to know
if you would like a soft drink or a biscuit.” Her house was a two-room walled shack. A soft drink would have put a substantial dent into her entire day’s salary. I declined as politely as I could and invited the girls to lunch.

  The girls were now joined by their two friends: Patricia, who they call Pablo, and Mary, who they call the Bishop. We all went for lunch in a little restaurant. We ate beans and drank cokes and then after lunch they explained, with all the wisdom of thirteen year olds, the ways of the world. In some ways, little Pablo was the most moving. She was about half the size of Joyce, and she stared earnestly back at me as she struggled to say what soccer meant to her:

  When I play soccer, I forget about my companies at home, which are bad people. They go to a place called Koinange Street. A girl like me, a thirteen-year-old girl, is being married by an old man, because she does not have a helper.

  I asked Rosemary about the girls that don’t play soccer. She replied with all the fervour of a religious convert, follow the path – soccer – and you will be all right. Don’t follow the path and you will end up in hell.

  Some girls just go for prostitution. They get married very early. Some have to drop out of school. And maybe some are helpless. No school fees. But if they could be playing football, they could avoid all those things. I can advise them to just come and play with us, and they’d see the changes in their lives.

  All the girls talk this way, about how soccer is a road to salvation. It is more than just a potential trip to Norway. It is hope in the middle of darkness.

  Clare O’Brien is a doctoral researcher at Oxford who spent time looking at girls’ soccer in the slums of Nairobi. She claims that in some places, soccer has become so well organized it is replacing church in the girls’ lives. I was deeply skeptical when I first heard her. But after listening to the children, I began to understand what she meant. She told me about part of her research where she gave some girls who were soccer players cameras and told them to bring back photographs showing what soccer meant to them.

  I got back pictures that were so shocking, that I wouldn’t have thought that this is what football would mean to someone. One of the pictures was of two girls, scaling a little mud wall, and there is a sewer going between the two walls, and there’s a boy sitting down, sniffing glue, and I was looking at this thinking, “Hmm, okay, what could this possibly mean?”

  The girl who took the photo said, “This is a sewer, and there’s no way to get out of here except to walk through the sewer. This boy here, sniffing glue, he’s given up. There’s no reason for him ever to leave this part of the slum. And maybe he never will. He might spend the rest of his life there, because there’s nothing that’s motivating him to get out of there and to do something more. But these two girls are going to a football game. What they’re doing is they’re scaling the wall and they’re taking the chance because they know that there’s nine other girls waiting for them to play football. And they’re willing to take the risk of falling in the sewer because they think that there might be something better for them out there. This is what football means for us. It’s a chance. It gets us out of our current situation because we believe that there’s something else better than what we have right now, and we know that there’s other people that are doing the same thing, that are waiting for us.”

  This story of salvation through soccer has an unlikely starting point: the small town of St. Catharines, Ontario. In 1987, Bob Munro, a Canadian development consultant who grew up in that town playing hockey in leagues organized by veterans of the Second World War, went into Mathare to pick up his daughter, who was teaching an English class. She was late. So Munro wandered around the compound. He saw children playing soccer with string and paper balls. He remembered his own childhood and he thought, Why shouldn’t the kids in Mathare have the same chance that I and my friends had when I was a kid?

  Munro contacted the chairman of a local church group with the idea of starting a small soccer league. “So I made this deal with them. I said, ‘Look, if you and your friends get together a little committee. I’ll work with you. The deal is this: if you do something, I’ll do something, and if you do nothing, I will do nothing.’ ” At the time he thought it was a pretty clever deal, which would prevent him from being too caught up in an organization. It hasn’t turned out that way.

  On the first day of the new sports league, Munro showed up with a clipboard and whistle expecting a small group of kids, maybe enough for six or eight teams. He was surprised. The children had lined up before dawn and there were enough boys there for twenty-five different teams. It was the beginning of the Mathare Youth Sports Association (MYSA), an organization that has had an influence far beyond this community. Its genius was to link the enthusiasm for sport with development.

  The kids loved playing soccer, and each season more and more teams joined the league. So the MYSA organizers added an original twist to the league standings: each team got the normal three points for a win and one point for a draw, but they would also get six points if they helped with some community development project. At first, Munro and the other leaders were not sure what it would be:

  We looked at a variety of things, and then the obvious thing jumped out: all this garbage, it was killing kids, and adults, in the slum…. because when it rains twice a year for several weeks, it flows down the hill and through their homes. So they are surrounded by contaminated water all the time. When you’re walking through contaminated water, if you have the slightest cut, it’ll kill you. You get infected, the medical care is not good in the slum, you get diarrhea or cholera, or meningitis and typhoid, you know, diseases that we think belong to the Middle Ages.

  For the garbage clean-up, each team had to show up and a “referee” would be there to make sure that all the players were there. If not all of them showed up, the team wouldn’t get the points. So the captains really put pressure on all the team members to show up or their chance of winning the league would be gone. The idea proved immensely popular both with the boys, but also with their parents, who could see an immediate and significant benefit to their children playing soccer. But then in the early 1990s, MYSA did something really revolutionary: they decided to organize soccer for girls.

  We had three problems. One problem was that the boys, and it was a boys’ organization then, they knew that girls couldn’t play football. The girls didn’t think they could. And the mothers didn’t want them to, because by the time they’re seven, eight, nine, the girls, while the mother is working, are looking after the younger brothers and sisters. So we would put tents up beside our field so that the girls could come with their little brothers and sisters and we ran a little daycare centre, which became very popular. And then the girls could play and the little ones would be looked after, and that’s how we got girls’ football started.

  Since those early days, MYSA has expanded to other programs: scholarships, loans, anti-HIV education campaigns. They have now directly helped more than 17,000 children in Mathare with scholarships and tens of thousands of others with library facilities, drama groups, and video production courses. But at the heart of all MYSA’s work is a key value: do something for us, we’ll do something for you; do nothing, you’ll get nothing. At first it may seem hard, tough love, but it stops the charity handout complex and is extraordinarily empowering.

  Bob Munro may have kicked off MYSA, but much of the organization has long outgrown him. It now has hundreds of leaders, most of whom came up the ranks of MYSA, first as players on youth teams, then on scholarships for helping to organize tournaments. It has just opened a brand new training centre for its teams on the edge of Mathare. It has offices, meeting halls, a video production studio, a weight room, and fitness centre.

  But amid all this good news and hopes of salvation through self-help and soccer, there is a problem. Its called the mafia. The precise name for it in the Mathare Valley is the Mungiki. They run things in the slum. They are the effective government. In Mathare, they’ve hijacked the water pipes that b
ring free water to the area and then sell water to the residents. The area is also a no-go area for any electricity meter reader. Mathare does receive electricity. But the inhabitants have to pay the mafia, not the electrical company.

  There are other mafia groups in the slums of Nairobi. Some have names taken from current events, so there is a gang called the Baghdad Boys and another ironically named the Taliban. The Taliban, who have absolutely no relation to Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden, or Islam, are the Mungiki’s big rivals in Mathare. They established a chana, or African whisky distillery. I went down to see it. The distillery is three smoked, lined plastic barrels. The water that is the principal ingredient is taken straight from the garbage-choked Mathare River, just downstream from a dozen open sewers. The actual whisky is not bad, considering it was brewed for forty-five minutes and then poured straight into plastic jerry cans, and it is a very lucrative business.

  In the fall of 2006, the Mungiki and Taliban fought a murderous war up and down the streets of Mathare for control of the distillery, which left several hundred people homeless. Both Patricia and Rosemary witnessed the fighting. They were afraid. They told me about fleeing from their homes and seeing a young man caught by the Mungiki: “They outnumbered him. They just stopped the car. Seeing it was a Taliban, they took him out, they burned his car, then they beat him, then they cut off his head.”

  I had a small sampling of what violence could be like in Mathare. I was working with a young Norwegian woman, Gunhild Forselv, who had been a colleague in Iraq and Turkey. We were staying at the home of one of the local MYSA leaders in the middle of Mathare. It was a small, mud-walled hut, next to the garbage dump. There were two rooms; we were in the kitchen-bedroom for his family. It was 10:20 p.m. There was a small pot of fish on the stove, the children were still awake, and we were joking about learning Norwegian. It was all very domestic, all very comfortable.