There was little magical about the 2021 Magical Kenya Open European Tour event that was held at the par-71 Karen Country Club last weekend.
South African Justin Harding may have smiled as he banked 20 million Kenyan shillings for his win as he improved from joint-second in 2019 but for Kenyan golfers, the Kenya Open Golf Limited (KOGL) who are the organizers of the event and for the Kenyan government which is the title sponsor, there was little to smile about.
The Kenya Open which is Kenya’s premier golf event joined the prestigious European Tour in 2019 as the Kenyan government sought to use golf to boost tourism in the country.
The Coronavirus pandemic saw the 2020 edition cancelled with the 2021 edition looking to build on the 2019 gains. In keeping with Ministry of Health guidelines the 2021 Open was played without fans in attendance and with golfers and caddies in a bio-secure bubble.
This meant the visiting golfers would not be able to adequately sample Kenya’s tourism offering lying to waste the government’s ambition of using golf to boost tourism numbers.
When announcing the Kenya Tourism Board title sponsorship in 2019 of the Kenya Open, Tourism Cabinet Secretary Najib Balala had celebrated the fact that the event would be beamed into homes globally. A television reach estimated at a possible 600 million viewers was set to offer a great marketing opportunity for Kenya as a tourism destination.
However, due to what the European Tour Productions termed as “logistical difficulties” the live world feed coverage that was to be used by Sky Sports and global broadcast partners was unavailable for three of the four days of the Magical Kenya Open. No TV coverage basically meant that if there was any magic on the greens it was being seen by no-one thereby hammering a further nail into the sports tourism coffin.
For the main story out of Karen country club on international media for three days of the Kenya Open to have been the lack of TV coverage was a huge blow to Kenya’s ambition to be a sports tourism hub through the hosting of high profile international sports events.
In June, the iconic Safari Rally is poised to rev off as a World Rally Championship leg. Kenya’s ability to pull off a flawless Safari amidst Covid-19 will lie in its ability to have world class organization and attention to detail. The world will be watching if the WRC Safari Rally organizers will have learnt from the mistakes of the 2021 Magical Kenya Open.
Onto the golfing action and from a Kenyan perspective there was very little to cheer. Only one Kenyan professional golfer, Samuel Njoroge of Railway Club made the cut in 2021 down from the two – Simon Ngige of Thika Golf Club and Justus Madoya of Great Rift Valley Lodge Golf Resort – who made the cut in 2019.
25-year old Njoroge, carded at par overall after rounds of 72, 68, 74, 70 to finish at position 77. For his efforts he banked 2, 257 euros which is Ksh. 293,000 from the event’s purse. He also took home the Ksh. 100,000 award from KBL for every Kenyan golfer to make the cut.
This poor performance was despite the best efforts of KOGL through the Safari Golf Tour, which was launched in 2018 as a preparation pad for local and regional professional players heading into the Kenya Open.
No Kenyan professional golfer has ever won the Kenya Open with Jacob Okello’s second place finish in 1998 the closest a Kenyan has gotten to success. It speaks volumes that Okello is still representing Kenya 23 years later.
From a layman’s perspective there are various reasons as to the continued poor performance of Kenyan golfers at the Kenya Open. First, golf still retains an elitist tag and is not seen as an actual sport by the general public. Second, the median age that Kenyan professional golfers pick up the sport is quite high compared to top golfers globally. Third, sponsorship of actual golfers to horn their skills at high level golf events outside the country is negligible. Fourth, the public golf facility at Lenana School that has been promised for years by the government is yet to be actualized.
A public golf facility would take the sport to the masses in ways the members-only golf clubs cannot while the facility been in a school would serve as a way to attract regular Kenyan kids to the sport thus removing the elitist tag while also reducing the age of Kenyan pro-golfers. Public tennis spaces in the under-privileged areas of California in America gave the world the phenomenal Williams sisters.
The one Magical thing about the Kenya Open is its ability to attract sponsorship. While other sports federations are barely surviving with the effects of the pandemic hitting Kenyan sportspeople hard, Kenya Open Golf Limited is swimming in money. Kenya Tourism Board, Vision 2030 Delivery secretariat, Absa Kenya, Kenya Breweries Limited all swung in with millions of shillings to boost the 2021 Magical Kenya Open.
How to turn the cash liquidity to Kenyan success on the greens is the million dollar question.
*A version of this article first appeared on Business Daily.
Moderate Kenyan 