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Kenya’s Sports Disputes Tribunal request on Tuesday to world governing body Fifa to establish a normalisation committee has brought about many uncertainties.
Key among the unanswered questions include: Who forms a normalisation committee? How are the members selected? What is the scope of their powers? For how long will the committee be in place? What happens if FKF declines to recognise the committee?
What is clear is that this will not be the first time that Kenyan football will be run by a Fifa Normalisation Committee.
In July 2004, Fifa’s executive member Jerome Champagne was sent to Kenya by the world body to help solve a simmering dispute between top flight clubs and then Kenya Football Federation that had paralysed football activities in Kenya.
What many did not know then was that that normalisation committee, headed by Kipchoge Keino, was one of the very first that Fifa had put in place.
Keino and his team laid the foundation for the Kenyan Premier League as we now know it, and allowed the clubs to organise their activities independent of the federation. This was quite a unique development because by doing so, Fifa had acted in support of the clubs, at the expense of their member association — a rarity.
Other countries that have been placed under this experience include Kuwait, Guinea, Guatemala, Greece, Argentina, Thailand, Mali and Benin.
In the last six months, normalisation committees have been appointed in Ghana, Uruguay and Cameroon. However, the circumstances which may call for this process are not clearly defined.
“The exceptional circumstances” in which Fifa may intervene tend to involve a member association’s failure to “manage their affairs independently and ensure that their own affairs are not influenced by any third parties … even where such influence is not the fault of the member association,” says an article by LawInSports.
The article further says: “The appointment of a normalisation committee is regarded as a last resort, when Fifa considers that the domestic governance of the game has irretrievably broken down. The constitution of a normalisation committee usually follows the suspension of a member association by the Council, where that member association is unable to confirm that it has demonstrated that it is able to comply with the requisite principles of good governance.”
On the composition of the committee, it is unclear whether there is any specific criterion for selecting members. The committee headed by Keino in 2004 had representatives from the coaches’ body, women’s clubs and FKF, as well as the two warring factions of the Kenyan top flight clubs. Keino was considered an impartial entity.
The four-member normalisation committee in Ghana was headed by Ghana National Petroleum Corporation and former Asante Kotoko chairman Kofi Koduah Sarpong, deputised by deputy sports minister Perry Okudzeto.
It also included a former CEO of a telecommunications network, a lawyer, and a former board member of a Ghanaian football club.
