Why the Fufa Awards risk becoming laughing stock

Many observers and purists were quick to note that several winners were not deserving. PHOTO BY JOHN BATANUDDE

What you need to know:

THE PURPOSE. An organiser of the awards once let your columnist in on why they don’t get along tolerably with facts. He said that the awards won’t fete already established players. The overriding goal of the awards, apparently, is to showcase “new stars.”

Not for the first time, the Fufa Awards have left observers and the general public alike feeling an intolerable aversion.
The mortifying moment of this year’s edition had long blipped on the radar before champagne was taken off the ice two Fridays ago. Many people were at their wits’ end when the shortlist for the Male Player of the Year - reportedly stitched together by Uganda Premier League (UPL) coaches - was revealed.

An investigation by The Observer peeled back layers of a selection process Fufa had shamelessly sold as seductively authentic, exposing it as a sleight of hand. Numbers did not quite add up to fashion a shortlist that had eventual winner Moses Waiswa, Viane Ssekajugo and Allan Okello. If the UPL coaches were bound by strict norms of honesty, many observers wanted to know why someone like Dan ‘Muzeyi’ Sserunkuma was overlooked!
Sserunkuma was consistency personified as his goals at the back end of the season guided Vipers SC to the 2017/18 UPL title. He did not shine in bits and pieces as Wasiwa, for all his prodigious talent, did. So what is going on here? I will tell you what: nothing unusual. We have been here before.

The Fufa Awards have built a reputation of consistently undermining the infrastructure of fact. They have pretty much dovetailed with the post-truth era in which we live. Never are the awards violently opposed to the idea of providing what by all accounts are alternative facts.
An organiser of the awards once let your columnist in on why they don’t get along tolerably with facts. He said that -- although they have and continue to do it with considerable misgiving -- the awards won’t fete “already established players.” The overriding goal of the awards, apparently, is to showcase “new stars.” This runs counter to the principle of meritocracy and doesn’t engender a spirit of hard work. Awards are supposed to merited with excellence - not pity - being the gold standard.

It is profoundly absurd that a deserving candidate can be snubbed on the flimsy excuse that they have toasted to feats before.
Jesus, whom Waiswa must have thanked two Fridays ago, put it neatly in Matthew 13:12. The scripture reads thus: “Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them.”
This explains why Leo Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo have taken turns heaping one award on the back of another in the global stage. There is little or no room for sentiment when it comes to awards; only facts.