Black Stars budgets: GFA’s incestuous relationship with the Sports Ministry

Depending on whom you ask, deflection can be anything.

To honest people, it allows them to buy time before circling back to that which is truthful and factual.

Politicians, to whom candor or any iteration of honesty is alien, use deflection as a vehicle to sidestep accountability; a submarine to navigate the storm-tossed seas of public scrutiny.

In the run-up to the 2016 presidential elections, Donald Trump’s tax compliance – or the lack of it, gained prominence.

Each time he was asked, Trump’s default response was, ”What about [Hillary Clinton’s] emails?”

One media engagement after the other, Trump danced around the topic all the way to the polls.

To quote the BBC’s Anthony Zucker, he ”played the media like a violin.”

Donald Trump faces off with Hillary Clinton for the presidential debate in 2016

Knowledge of this why the Ghana Football Association’s (GFA) statement in response to President John Dramani Mahama’s call for transparency was unmistakably familiar.

In a statement that like many others, did not come from the GFA’s Communications Department, the football governing body said ”The GFA has always provided the Ministry responsible for Sports with the first draft budget for the national teams.”

”Beyond this, everything to do with the budgeting and expenditure related to the Black Stars sits with the Ministry. For emphasis, payments made in relation to the Black Stars are exclusively handled by the Ministry.”

But was this bland attempt at clarification necessary at all?

The President did not at all suggest that the GFA was solely responsible for the secrecy surrounding Ghana’s national teams expenditure.

”I have instructed my office and the Minister for Sports and Recreation to hold the Ghana Football Association accountable to the people of Ghana as we prepare for these games. Especially regarding the budget of the GFA,” he said.

In the extended version, President Mahama envelopes all other federations and national teams in his call for translucency.

On the specific subject of the Black Stars budget, the GFA’s response is nothing more than a failed attempt to deflect focus and shirk responsibility.

By their admission, the budget process starts when GFA sends a draft. Right from the drafting to the approval, the GFA has always been at the heart of these discussions.

Yet, the GFA has always chosen to deflect scrutiny when journalists and the public ask them for details of the Black Stars or any national team budget.

But in keeping with its unrepentantly opaque and accountability-abhorring nature, the GFA had to deflect.

Perhaps, their response is borne out of a feeling of guilt, a self-convicting knowledge that they are the other half of a high-level collusion between the sports ministry and the GFA.

So in truth, Mahama’s speech on Thursday could not have been directed entirely to the GFA. Not for someone who suffered what until that point, was the most emphatic election defeat in Ghana’s history post-Rawlings. (Of course, the 38.2 gang would redefine those terms but that is a different matter.)

Perhaps the biggest scandal of the first Mahama administration (2012-2016) was the Brazil 2014 scandal and it was birthed by the same opacity surrounding the Black Stars budget.

Back then, and just like now, it was the GFA who produced a spirited defense, as two entities who had sold their souls for money, kept the public in the dark.

This is not new.

Ibrahim Sannie Daara, the GFA’s Communications Director at the time, remarkably suggested that the Black Stars budget for the 2014 FIFA World Cup in Brazil, was a state secret.

”I’d say with no equivocation that as I sit here as Director of Communications of the GFA, I’ve not seen the breakdown.”

”The Chief of Staff has said that this is a state secret and if someone brings it and if I am not able to authenticate it, I will say that person is carrying a false document,” Sannie Daara said on GTV’s Sunday Night Live on March 30, 2014.

Tried as journalists did, the sports ministry and the GFA remained firm in their bare-faced treachery.

A year later, the incestuous affair between the pair was again exposed.

After Ghana’s 2014 World Cup ended, the state instituted a public inquiry into the events that led to player revolt, and worse.

Black Stars defender John Boye was seen kissing wads of cash in Brazil; an image that created disaffection for the player and the team

By the end of the Justice Dzamefe Commission’s work, public trust and interest in the Black Stars was at an all-time low. The GFA took an even bigger hit.

So when Ghana qualified for AFCON 2015, the entire country did not care about the team. The country felt betrayed by the money-grabbing mercenaries (GFA, Sports Ministry, and the Black Stars team).

As if the shocking revelations of mismanagement and evidence of corruption were not enough, GFA and the sports ministry again conspired to give Ghanaians the middle finger just before the tournament.

In a radio interview, Mahama Ayaraiga Ghana’s sports minister described calls to disclose the budget for the tournament as ”useless”.

”It is not my job to respond to useless questions as far as the AFCON 2015 is concerned. Talk about the developmental issues of the ministry and not questions that will not benefit us.”

As disappointing as this was, it was consistent with the way of the lost world.

Then-GFA boss Kwesi Nyantakyi giving testimony before the Justice Dzamefe Commission in 2014

”When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it.” Frédéric Bastiat

How else would a public servant evade a call to be accountable on a matter relating to the sector over which he exercises jurisdictional authority?

Mahama Ayariga and Sannie Dara were not the last of them. As disgusting as this incestuous relationship is, it has produced many offspring.

In 2019, then-Sports Minister Isaac Asiamah sidestepped mandatory procedure by refusing to give an itemized breakdown of the state’s expenditures at AFCON 2019 in Egypt.

Three years later, his predecessor, Mustapha Ussif also did not disclose how much the country spent at the AFCON 2021 in Cameroun and the exact details of the expenditure.

In 2023, Mustapha Ussif continued with the trend when he told Parliament that the country saved $3 million but spent $5 million in its eleven-day stay in Qatar for the 2022 World Cup.

Last year, Mustapha Ussif informed parliament that the country’s eleven-day stay in Cote d’Ivoire during AFCON 2023 cost over $3 million, while $2 million was saved.

Just like he did after the World Cup in 2022, there was no itemized breakdown of what the country spent the money on. The GFA would not provide that either.

That is the history of the brothel(s) pontificating piety in the call for accountability.

Therefore, the ugly noises of the GFA will not move the needle.

What will, is for President Mahama to whip the sector Minister in line.

Failing this we all have to resort to the Right to Information Bill. Hopefully, the beneficiaries of this collusion do not frustrate the process as many others have.