Hotel Detains Officials in Arusha as 120 Kenyan Children get ditched by buses at Namanga Border

By Staff Writer On Dec 20, 2022

Nearly 120 Children from Kenya who had travelled to Tanzania for the Youth Soccer Tournament in Arusha, have been abandoned at Namanga Border.

It seems the bus operators commissioned to ferry the 117 school children from Nairobi to Arusha and back, haven’t been paid.

In order to force the organizers to settle the payments, the bus drivers decided to jettison the children at the Namanga border station until the bill is settled.

The Members of the Ligi Ndogo Soccer Academy, were previously detained briefly at the Lush Garden hotel which accommodated them in Arusha after the people in-charge failed to pay for their meals and accommodation.

It is not known how many days that the group has been accommodated at the hotel located in Kwa-Idd area of Ngaramtoni, but the soccer tourney ran between December 13 and 18, 2022.

However, the hotel owners decided to let the pupils go because they were children and detained the Ligi Ndogo Director and Chairperson, Chris Amemo and two other officials of the club, pending balance payment.

Already some parents of the affected children travelled to Namanga to see how they could rescue the situation.

Ligi Ndogo Children who were stuck at Namanga

Initially each parent was required to pay Kenya Shillings 50,000 per child to participate in the annual East African Youth Soccer Tourney, known as Chipkizi Cup.

As usual the youth football event was organized by the Arusha-based Future Stars Academy (FSA) and featured talent scouts from the Spanish National League, LaLiga.

More than 300 teams from Kenya, Uganda, DR Congo, Zimbabwe, Zanzibar and the Host Tanzania mainland took part in the 13^th instalment of Chipkizi Cup. Kenya fielded 90 teams.

‘Ligi Ndogo,’ (Little League), which faces problems after the tourney, is a football club and youth academy based in the Kenyan Capital of Nairobi.

It also has a senior team which currently competes in the National Super League.

Surprisingly, Ligi Ndogo has been participating in Chipkizi Cup tourneys in the past without encountering problems.

It is not known how the institution should suddenly expose children to this type of treatment in the 2022 season of the East African Youth Soccer Tourney.