Kigali took the chequered flag while Nairobi was still looking for the keys
Motorsport
By
Koome Kazungu
| Oct 29, 2026
On a March afternoon in 1993, Alain Prost brought his Williams home first at Kyalami, just north of Johannesburg, and Formula One quietly packed its crates and left Africa. Nobody called it a farewell. The sport never came back.
A child born in Nairobi that year is now in their 30s, has watched a thousand races on a phone screen, and has never seen one on this continent.
That is about to change, and it won't happen in Johannesburg, Cairo, Lagos, or Nairobi. It is Bugesera, a stretch of red earth some 40 kilometres south of Kigali, where Rwanda is building a new international airport and, right beside it, a racetrack.
The news arrived in a week that told you most of what you need to know about ambition in this region. On Thursday, October 8, Kenya learned that the Safari Rally would keep its place on the 2027 World Rally calendar. It should have been a proud day. It felt more like a patient being discharged after a long scare. For months, the event had hung in the balance.
The championship promoter wanted financial guarantees by mid-September. The government had already said it would stop paying from 2027. So who would? The question was passed around Nairobi like a hot potato until, almost at the buzzer, private money stepped in. The rally was saved. Nobody was entirely sure how close it had come to being lost.
The following Tuesday, Kigali held a coronation. President Paul Kagame walked onto the stage at the BK Arena with Stefano Domenicali, who runs Formula One, and Mohammed Ben Sulayem of the FIA, and announced a ten-year contract for the Formula 1 African Grand Prix.
The first race could run as early as 2030, on a circuit designed by the firm of former Grand Prix driver Alexander Wurz. Rwanda, a country you could fit into Kenya more than twenty times, had done what South Africa, with Kyalami and all its history, could not.
Kenya scraped through qualifying
It is tempting to explain this away, and plenty of people in Nairobi have tried. Rwanda is small, tidy and run from the top, the argument goes, so of course it can promise things we cannot.
There is some truth in that, and I will come back to it. But it is too convenient. Rwanda did not stumble into Formula One. It walked there slowly over several years, leaving footprints anyone could have followed.
Look at the order of things. First came the shirts: Visit Rwanda on Arsenal's sleeve, then on Paris Saint-Germain's. Then came an arena good enough for the Basketball Africa League. Then the big rooms.
In December 2024, Kigali hosted the FIA's general assembly and its end-of-season awards, and Max Verstappen collected his fourth world championship trophy in the Rwandan capital. That same week, Kagame stood before motorsport's rulers and declared the bid.
A year later, the city staged cycling's road world championships, the first ever held in Africa. Each occasion was a job interview, and every time Rwanda turned up early, did the work, and sent the guests home happy.
When the contract finally reached the table, Formula One's executives were not taking a leap of faith. They were renewing an old acquaintance.
Now picture those same executives looking at Kenya. They would see the Safari, a genuine legend that rally fans from Finland to Japan can name. They would also see a federation that has spent years in and out of court, ministries and counties tugging at the same rope, and a flagship event whose survival seems to hang each year on a late phone call to State House.
They might recall April 2022, when Machakos unveiled a so-called mini Formula One circuit that made the evening news and very little else. And they would surely remember what Lewis Hamilton said in March, moments after telling reporters how much he had loved his time here: "I don't think we're going to have a Grand Prix in Kenya." He said it gently. In the same breath, he called Rwanda spectacular.
That line has stayed with me. Hamilton is the loudest voice in the sport arguing for an African race. He likes us. Still, when he pictures a Grand Prix on this continent, he doesn't picture it here. Affection was never our problem. Follow-through is.
One detail in the Rwandan deal Kenyans should read twice. The race will not be called the Rwandan Grand Prix. It is the African Grand Prix, with Visit Rwanda as the presenting name. The organisers have said a national title would have shut others out and made it harder to sign partners from around the continent. That door is deliberately left ajar, and it opens straight onto our side of the border.
Somebody will fly the teams, the freight, and tens of thousands of fans into Bugesera. Kenya Airways has the hub and the routes to be that somebody, if it picks up the phone this year rather than in 2029.
Somebody is going to supply the mechanics, marshals, medics, caterers, camera crews and security officers that a race weekend swallows whole. Rwanda cannot find them all at home, and Kenya trains them by the thousand.
The firms that move cars, people and satellite trucks through the Naivasha dust every March already know how to deliver under pressure. And somewhere in a karting paddock in Nairobi there may be a 12-year-old with quick hands who, given real backing, could one day race at Bugesera instead of watching from the stands.
None of that requires us to host a Grand Prix. It only requires us to stop sulking about not having one.
I should be honest that Kigali's prize comes with baggage. Congo's foreign minister has called the deal morally indefensible, pointing to Rwanda's alleged backing of the M23 rebels in eastern Congo, and rights groups have raised the old complaint that sport is being used to polish a government's image. Those concerns are real and deserve a hearing.
Formula One, which races happily in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia and Azerbaijan, is in no position to lecture anyone. But a neighbour's flaws do not excuse our own drift. You do not get faster by pointing at the car in front of you.
What would it take for Kenya to be taken seriously the next time a global sport goes shopping in Africa? Less money than we imagine, and more patience than we usually show.
A Safari secured five years at a time, funded by sponsors on contracts that do not expire with a cabinet reshuffle. One body in charge of motorsport, with politicians watching from the grandstand rather than the pit wall.
A properly costed plan for a permanent, internationally graded circuit near JKIA or Konza, built first for regional championships and club racing. The habit of bidding for the FIA's meetings and award nights until the people who run the sport grow used to the Nairobi skyline. And steady money for the young drivers and engineers who will otherwise end up building someone else's dream.
Rwanda's secret, if it has one, is that it kept showing up. Year after year, event after event, it did the dull things well until the glamorous thing arrived. Size had little to do with it. Habit had everything to do with it.
Sometime around 2030, five red lights will go out over the grid at Bugesera and Africa's long wait will end in a roar.
Kenyans will be there. We always are. The only question is whether we will be sitting in the stands with everyone else, or standing in the pit lane with our names on the passes.
koomegeorge083@gmail.com