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17.08.2018 Feature Article

A Win-Win For Ghana On FIFA

A Win-Win For Ghana On FIFA
17.08.2018 LISTEN

I knew it was wrongheaded and contrary to the long-established principles of the nongovernmental interference in the affairs of the Ghana Football Association (GFA), and all its continental African and global counterparts, as clearly articulated and laid down by the Executive Committee of the Federation of International Football Associations (FIFA), when President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo summarily caused the Executive Board or Administration of the GFA, largely based on the screening of a movie documentary exposing the seamy underbelly of rank corruption of some top officials of Ghana’s institutional regulators of Association Football or soccer in the country.

Back then, I was fully convinced that the Government’s initial reaction to the admittedly outrageous corruption racket involving the GFA’s President, Mr. Kwasi Nyantakyi, was decidedly an overkill. It was not in any way because I believed that the main target of the Anas Aremeyaw Anas exposé or sting operation was not culpable of any of the crimes and/or misdemeanors attributed to him. It was just that I felt strongly that the deliberate process of jurisprudence ought to be invoked, if condign justice was to be objectively and dispassionately exacted from those who really deserved to be punished and severely so, if the requisite confidence was to be more effectively and permanently restored to the Executive Board and membership of the GFA.

Now, those of us who were dead-set against the summary liquidation of the GFA have been vindicated. But, of course, such vindication is only to the extent that formal FIFA procedures/guidelines had not been followed. Which is why in the wake of Senior Minister Yaw Osafo-Maafo’s meeting with the FIFA Headquarters Officials in Zurich, Switzerland, the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Ms. Gloria Akuffo, has decided to withdraw the lawsuit seeking to legally and officially liquidate the corporate entity of the Ghana Football Association (See “Breaking News: Gov’t to Withdraw Liquidation Case Against GFA: ExCo Dissolved” Modernghana.com 8/16/18).

I also maintain my remarkably long-held stance against the method or means by which the long-suspected shenanigans at the Headquarters of the Nyantakyi-headed GFA were exposed, that is, via the admittedly remarkable footwork of private detectives, to wit, the Anas Aremeyaw Anas-owned and operated Tiger-Eye PI network. Instead, what I want to see, and healthily and appropriately so, is the need for the Akufo-Addo Administration to promptly and heavily invest in the upgrading and the restoration of public confidence in our national security agencies, in particular the institution of the Ghana Police Service. We have a national security crisis, when a private detective and/or his agency are held in greater confidence and with greater respect than our own national security agencies, which have been effectively reduced to a laughing stock.

The good news here is that the old Nyantakyi-led GFA Executive Board is not coming back or being resuscitated. As well, and even more significantly, some 6,000 Ghanaian soccer players whose professional prospects and livelihood appeared to be hanging in the balance, can now go back to work rest assured of not being threatened with certain membership on the unemployment list. That was my one great concern for the Akufo-Addo Administration. Thankfully, the President, an avid soccer fan and former player on the University of Ghana’s soccer team himself, through his own nimble diplomatic skills and ingenuity, as well as that of his Senior Minister, has brought an amicable and constructive resolution to this most sensitive and far-reaching crisis.

Once again, contrary to the sanguinary predictions of his inveterate detractors, President Akufo-Addo has handily demonstrated that he may very well be the astute and visionary leader and problem-solver that Ghanaian voters went to the polls and wisely elected in December 2016. Bravo, Omanpanyin!

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

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