Newly elected FKF boss exposed in players’ passport scandal
Barely days afters assuming her new position as the Deputy President of Football Kenya Federation, Doris Petra, has came under scrutiny for her involvement in a scandal three years ago in which millions of shillings allocated to the national women football team might have been swindled.
The allegations are contained in a seven minute documentary titled Fix my Country prepared by renowned investigative journalist John Allan Namu.
According to the documentary, sometime in 2012, Petra, then serving as a NEC member in the previous FKF office collected passports of Harambee Starlets players with intent to processing payments from the Government to enable the squad travel to Tanzania to honour a competitive assignment.
However, the trip was cancelled although it later emerged that the passports were stamped by “immigration officials” to indicate that the team visited Tanzania and stayed there for several days.
“An official collected the players’ passports through me as the captain, saying it was for reporting purposes. I did as she requested but it took a while before she returned the passports,” the team’s former captain Doreen Nabwire recounts in the documentary.
According to Nabwire, the players only got back their passports after three weeks, but unbeknownst to her and her teammates their traveling documents had serious anomalies.
“I hadn’t noticed the passports had been stamped until a journalist called me up for an interview and asked to scrutinize the document, upon which I noticed that they had been stamped showing that we had been in Tanzania for some seven days,” Nabwire says.
MONEY SWINDLED
Indeed, Nabwire’s claims are corroborated by former FKF NEC member Hussein Terry who says he investigated the scandal when it broke.
“That was a scandal, I remember it very well. After coming back from Ethiopia, their (the players) passports were taken and they were told that the team would travel to Tanzania,” he recalls.
“They stayed for around 30 days and nothing happened and that is when they came to us to complain. When we went to the ministry we found that the passports had been stamped as if the players had entered Tanzania and come back for one week,” he says.
Normally, the Government releases funds to cater for national teams whenever they are involved in such assignments. The expenses include airfare, accommodation and per diem.
other than Petra, who is said to have been the team’s Head of delegation at the time, the other person adversely mentioned in scam is a Ministry of Sports official only referred to as Idagwa.
However, Petra has maintained her innocence over the incident.
“I was never involved in that. Maybe there was a reason it was done but not to swindle money. And no other money was spent,” she says.
