FA Presidential Election Heads For Arbitration?

The hotly contested issue of candidate disqualification that has hit the GFA presidential election is heading for a sort of arbitration following petitions by the two victims.

In an apparent response to demands and threats by disqualified candidates Vincent Sowah Odotei and Neil Armstrong Mortagbe, the Ghana Football Association (GFA) Executive Committee yesterday convened an emergency meeting in Accra to initiate moves to salvage the polls from a possible legal showdown in the courts.

The meeting, according to sources, was to deliberate on the formation of a team of arbitrators comprising representatives of the two disqualified candidates and the GFA to attempt to resolve the dispute that has characterised the election since nominations opened until the two candidates were eventually disqualified.

Yesterday’s emergency meeting which summoned the entire Executive Committee to Accra was a follow-up to an earlier one held last Tuesday which could not take a conclusive decision on the formation of the arbitration panel from the GFA side.

In their separate letters to the GFA this week, which registered their respective ­rejection of their disqualification, both Sowah Odotei and Armstrong-Mortagbe ­warned that they could be compelled to go to court ­to obtain justice if they did not receive a favourable response from the GFA.

“I shall have no alternative to seek refuge in the wide arms of the High Court and the Supreme Court of the land to curtail the electoral process until my rights are duly recognised and the issue of bias appropriately addressed,” Odotei’s letter stated in part.

Indeed, Odotei and Armstrong-Mortagbe were disqualified from contesting the April 28 polls after an interim report by a three-member Election Committee suggested that their nomination forms were flawed.

The two have since challenged the grounds for their separate disqualifications.