The Sports Disputes Tribunal keeps playing outside the pitch Parliament marked for it. It has completely gone rogue, it is belligerent and listens to no one but itself. It is time the Chief Justice and the other authorities interevened.
Imagine a football referee who books a spectator for spilling beer in the stands. He then sends off a club secretary for a boardroom quarrel, and finally awards a player his salary in the car park. Called to account, he says he was only “promoting sport”. Nobody would tolerate that referee. Yet Kenya has been tolerating a tribunal that does all three.
The Sports Disputes Tribunal does valuable work when it stays on its pitch: selection appeals, disciplinary appeals from national federations, anti-doping cases. Off that pitch, it has become a repeat offender. Bar brawls in private members’ clubs, boardroom fights in private companies, the governance of federations incorporated under the Companies Act, the employment contracts of footballers: the Tribunal has claimed them all. It has done so despite a steady run of superior court decisions telling it, in plain English, that it has no business there.
Parliament did not leave the Tribunal’s remit to imagination. Section 58 of the Sports Act, 2013 gives it exactly three doors:
1. Appeals from national sports organisations, or umbrella national sports organisations, whose rules specifically allow appeals to the Tribunal on that issue. Disciplinary and team-selection appeals are the examples given.
2. Other sports-related disputes that all parties agree to refer to the Tribunal, and that the Tribunal agrees to hear.
3. Appeals from decisions of the Sports Registrar.
That is the entire list. There is no fourth door marked “anything that happens near a golf course”. There is no clause allowing the Tribunal to police every body that owns a football or a tennis net.
The Tribunal is a creature of statute. Its jurisdiction is what the statute gives it, nothing more. The Supreme Court said so in Samuel Kamau Macharia v Kenya Commercial Bank (2012): no court or tribunal may arrogate to itself jurisdiction beyond what the law confers. The Court of Appeal said long before, in Owners of the Motor Vessel “Lillian S” (1989), that jurisdiction is everything. A body without it must down its tools the moment the question is raised. It must not park the question and carry on hearing the merits.
The superior courts have been saying the same thing for nearly a decade. The Tribunal keeps hearing something else.
In KCB Sports Club v SDT [2026] KEELRC 2069 ELRC, Mbarũ J, 16 July 2026 A player’s claim on a subsisting employment contract is an employment dispute. It does not invoke section 58. Award quashed.
Republic v SDT; MSFK [2026] KEHC 13906 High Court, Orina J, 24 September 2026 Registration under the Act is not the same as adjudicatory jurisdiction. The Tribunal must name the section 58 gateway it relies on. Ruling quashed, further proceedings prohibited.
Vetlab Sports Club v SDT [2026] KEHC 5400 High Court, Aburili J, 22 April 2026 A club board wrangle is not a sports dispute. A club cannot confer jurisdiction by amending its constitution. Tribunal barred from all Vetlab disputes until the club registers.
Ongwenyi v Royal Nairobi Golf Club [2026] KEHC 1187 High Court, 10 February 2026 A dispute is not sports-related merely because it arises where sport is played. The Tribunal has no inherent or residual jurisdiction.
Board of Limuru Country Club v SDT [2025] KEHC 16425 High Court, Aburili J, 10 November 2025 A bar fight between club members, and the club’s discipline that followed, is private club governance. Tribunal judgment quashed.
Republic v SDT; FKF [2023] KEHC 20326 High Court, Ngaah J, 2023 The Tribunal exceeded its jurisdiction by bypassing the federation’s internal appeals committee.
Gor Mahia FC v SDT [2023] KEELRC 3224 ELRC, Ongaya J, 2023 Employment disputes belong to the ELRC. Parties cannot agree to hand them to the Tribunal.
Dennis Kadito v Office of the SDT [2017] KEHC 2146 High Court, 2017 Section 58(a) needs rules that allow an appeal to the Tribunal. Section 58(b) needs every party’s agreement. Both conditions are constitutional.
The ELRC has said the same in Sofapaka FC v SDT [2022] KEELRC 697 and Bandari FC v SDT [2025] KEELRC 3332.
The irony is sharpest in Kadito. The High Court there was affirming the Tribunal’s own earlier ruling. In 2016 the Tribunal itself described section 58(b) as a three-stage test: the dispute must be sports-related, all parties must agree to refer it, and the Tribunal must agree to hear it. The law has not changed since. Only the Tribunal’s appetite has.
On the night of 1 September 2024, a quarrel at the bar of Limuru Country Club ended with a beer bottle through a 65-inch television. The club’s disciplinary committee suspended the members involved, suspended their golf handicaps and fined them Ksh 50,000 each. That is what clubs do.
The members appealed to the Sports Disputes Tribunal. The club objected: a bar brawl is not a sports dispute. The Tribunal declined to decide that objection first. It rolled it into the main hearing, then found that the club was a sporting entity because it played golf and was affiliated to the golf union. It set the sanctions aside and restored the handicaps.
The High Court was not amused. Justice Aburili held that the Tribunal had conflated private club discipline with sports regulation. She added a line every Tribunal member should frame: jurisdiction under the Sports Act cannot be assumed by anticipation. It must rest on actual registration under the statute.
Five months later the Tribunal did it again. At Vetlab Sports Club, two officials contested their suspension from the club’s leadership. The Tribunal assumed jurisdiction, leaning on an amended club constitution that surfaced after the case was filed. The same judge quashed that too. A club’s constitution, she held, cannot confer jurisdiction that only the Constitution or statute can give.
The principle is not complicated:
• A private members’ club is a contract among its members. Its articles and by-laws govern discipline and elections. The courts have said so repeatedly, from Mwagiru v Muthaiga Country Club (2024) to Kiptoo v Eldoret Club (2022).
• Most such clubs are companies limited by guarantee. Their members already have a remedy. Section 780 of the Companies Act, 2015 lets an aggrieved member go to the High Court for unfairly prejudicial conduct.
• The High Court already hears these cases. Republic v Rift Valley Sports Club (2024) and Mwaura v Veterinary Laboratory Sports Club (2023) are recent examples. Where constitutional rights are at stake, the courts have refused to let clubs hide behind privacy.
• Playing golf does not make a club a sports organisation. Under section 46(1) of the Sports Act, a body operates as one only if it is registered as one. Affiliation to a union, owning a course or offering a squash court changes nothing.
No member is left without a remedy. The only thing missing is a reason for the Tribunal to be involved. A tribunal that reviews a bar-room fine because the offender also plays golf has confused the members’ bar with the members’ tee box.
The Constitution does not leave employment disputes to whoever wants them. Article 162(2)(a) created a specialised court for them, and Parliament gave it jurisdiction through the Employment and Labour Relations Court Act. No statute, and no agreement between parties, can move that jurisdiction to a sports tribunal.
The Tribunal went ahead anyway in the KCB Sports Club case. A player on a fixed-term contract was left out of the club’s 30-man squad for the 2025/26 season. The club kept paying his salary. The Tribunal found that leaving him out was not a breach of contract. It then found him constructively dismissed and awarded Ksh 854,000 in residual salary and Ksh 366,000 in general damages. Justice Mbarũ pointed out the obvious problem. Constructive dismissal means the employee treats the contract as ended because of the employer’s breach. Here there was no breach, the salary kept arriving, and the employment was still running. The essence of the claim was an employment relationship, which does not engage section 58. The award was quashed.
This is not a new lesson. Gor Mahia taught it in 2023, Sofapaka in 2022 and Bandari in 2025. A player is an athlete on Saturday, but on payday he is an employee, and his payslip is the ELRC’s business.
Fairness requires acknowledging that the Tribunal does give reasons, sometimes at great length. It has cited the parliamentary Hansard and academic articles to prove what Parliament “must have meant”. But each of its favourite arguments has been tested in the High Court, and each has failed.
1. “Substance over form.” The argument is that a golf club is really a sports body, whatever its incorporation papers say. Justice Orina’s answer in the MSFK case is the right one. The doctrine may help identify what an entity is, but it cannot create jurisdiction where the statute has set limits.
2. “Registration means consent.” In Seka FC (2025), the Tribunal reasoned that registering under the Sports Act implies a tacit agreement to submit to its jurisdiction. That quietly deletes the words “all parties agree” from section 58(b). The MSFK judgment is blunt: regulatory registration and adjudicatory jurisdiction are related but distinct.
3. “The Act anticipates it.” In Limuru the Tribunal said the Act “anticipates” regulating private clubs. The High Court’s reply: jurisdiction cannot be assumed by anticipation.
4. “Dual regulation is lawful.” True, and irrelevant. A company can be answerable under both the Companies Act and the Sports Act. That does not make the Tribunal the forum for every dispute about its affairs. Otherwise, as MSFK put it, a specific statutory jurisdiction becomes a general jurisdiction over every registered sporting body.
5. “We will decide jurisdiction with the merits.” This is the most troubling route. It lets the Tribunal hear everything, decide everything, and treat the objection as an afterthought. Lillian S says the opposite: a jurisdictional objection is decided first, on the material available, and a body without jurisdiction does not take one more step.
Then there is precedent. Tribunals exercising judicial authority are bound by decisions of the High Court. Where binding decisions are cited in a preliminary objection, a tribunal may distinguish them honestly. It may not simply look past them. Counsel in Vetlab accused the Tribunal of inventing distinctions no party had raised in order to escape the Limuru decision. Whether or not that is fair, the pattern of results speaks for itself.
A decision made without jurisdiction is a nullity from the start. That sounds like a clean ending, but it is an expensive one.
• The litigants. Members who go to the Tribunal in good faith spend months there, win, and then watch the award evaporate on judicial review. They are then told to start again in the right forum, often after limitation periods and suspensions have run.
• The clubs and federations. Each one must hire counsel twice, once to object and once to go to the High Court. In most of these cases the courts ordered each side to bear its own costs, so the winner still pays to be proved right.
• The High Court. The Judicial Review Division is already stretched. It now spends scarce time repeating the same lesson in case after case.
• Sport itself. Federation elections, championship hosting and team selection are all left hanging while jurisdiction is fought over. The MSFK dispute stalled a federation’s AGM and elections.
• The rule of law. When a subordinate body treats binding decisions as optional, every other tribunal is watching. Precedent works only if it is followed without needing to be enforced case by case.
Whatever the explanation, and this writer will not speculate about motives, the result is the same. A body created to deliver quick, cheap and specialised sports justice has become a source of slow, costly and avoidable litigation.
The courts have done their part, one quashing order at a time. That approach does not scale. The authorities responsible for the Tribunal need to act.
To the Chief Justice. As head of the Judiciary and chair of the Judicial Service Commission, the Chief Justice leads the justice system in which tribunals exercising judicial authority under Article 169 now sit. We ask for four things:
1. A formal review of the Tribunal’s compliance with binding superior court decisions on section 58 since Kadito.
2. A practice direction, or a circular to all tribunals, making clear that binding decisions cited in a preliminary objection must be applied or openly distinguished with reasons.
3. A requirement that jurisdictional objections be heard and decided before the merits, as Lillian S demands.
4. Judicial training for Tribunal members on the limits of their statutory jurisdiction.
This is not a request to interfere in any pending case. It is a request to ensure that a subordinate body follows law already settled.
To the Judicial Service Commission. Where members of a tribunal repeatedly disregard binding authority, that is a question of performance and conduct. It deserves an institutional answer, not only another judicial review.
To the Cabinet Secretary responsible for sports and the Sports Registrar. Make clear to federations and clubs what registration under the Act means and what it does not. Registration is not a blank cheque for jurisdiction.
To the Attorney General. The State has sometimes defended these assumptions of jurisdiction in court, as it did in Limuru. Public resources should not be spent defending positions the High Court has rejected again and again.
To Parliament. The Sports (Amendment) Bill, 2026 reportedly seeks to widen the Tribunal’s powers over governance, administration and elections. That is the proper route: if the Tribunal needs more power, Parliament should give it expressly. But Parliament should also:
• expressly exclude the internal affairs of private members’ clubs;
• restate that employment disputes remain with the Employment and Labour Relations Court;
• provide that registration does not by itself amount to consent under section 58(b);
• require jurisdictional objections to be determined first.
To the Law Society and the sports law bar. Keep raising the objection early. Never argue the merits without reserving jurisdiction. Ask the High Court for costs against those who file in the wrong forum. And watch for a case that can take this question to the Court of Appeal, so that one binding judgment settles it.
Kenya needs a strong Sports Disputes Tribunal. Athletes left out of national squads need one. So do federations facing disciplinary appeals, and so does anti-doping enforcement. That is precisely why its authority must not be wasted on bar fights, boardroom feuds and payslips that belong elsewhere.
A referee earns respect by knowing the rulebook better than anyone on the pitch, not by rewriting it mid-match. Section 58 is short and clear. The superior courts have explained it at least eight times. The next step is not a ninth judgment. It is for those who oversee the Tribunal to insist that it reads the rulebook, and follows it.
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