By Isaac Massaquoi
The African Nations Cup tournament, the continent’s showpiece football event is drawing to a close in South Africa. One thing is now certain – the trophy will come to West Africa. The East Africans were among the first wave of departures. Ethiopia failed to get out of the group stages. Then the North Africans were thrown out followed by the host South Africa. The other Southerner, Zambia, the defending champion, was very disappointing. Now I am beginning to side with those who argued last year that Zambia’s triumph in Gabon and Equatorial Guinea was a real fluke. That it’s all now left to West Africa is actually no surprise. Our region was able to break North African dominance of African football in the late 80s and no other region has seriously challenged West Africa for the trophy since. The Egyptians have caused a few upsets here and there but African football is now West Africa’s stronghold. Ask any Sierra Leonean what their biggest regret is from this year’s tournament, they will tell you it’s the fact that Leone Stars are not in South Africa. Those of us who followed the national team’s qualifying campaign can see absolutely no reason why Leone Stars failed to qualify for the tournament. Leone Stars have an immediate challenge coming up. That’s the World Cup qualifiers and we face the same country that nailed our coffin, effectively burying us away from CAN 2013 – Tunisia. I will return to this towards the end of this piece but I should, even at this stage, and very courageously say that we face being eliminated again if we continued with our mediocre handling of issues as important as getting the national football team on the world stage that is the Africa Cup of Nations or indeed the World Cup due in Brazil next year. Left with me this country should take a long term view and develop a project to completely re-construct Sierra Leone football. It will be painful, time-consuming and expensive, requiring a lot of patience and understanding. I know that there was a time when Ghana, a power house of African football lost their glory and suffered humiliating defeats across the continent in all tournaments. They did something drastic. They pulled out of all competitions for a few years and worked very hard to put a new national team together. Many Ghanaianswere disappointed but once the project was explained to them in detail, they understood it and supported their government. Ghana is not totally out of the woods yet but their football has improved greatly and barring a catastrophe of Tsunami proportions, Ghana would surely be in the final this year. Not too long ago, I advocated loudly for Sierra Leone to adopt the same strategy but I remember being told many things, some very unpleasant by some friends who argued that I was a pessimist and I will take back my words once we qualified for both the Nations Cup and the World Cup. My conviction was based on the basic facts on the ground about the local game. For the purpose of this piece, let me repeat the main ones again. I don’t think any of us should be proud of the problems that have befallen the Sierra Leone Football Association. Many people don’t like to confront issues like this but let me do it. How come the Sierra Leone Football Association with less than 50 voting members was unable to conduct its own election to bring in a new executive at the end of the uneventful reign of Nahim Khadi? Khadi was never even in the country to run the FA. The truth is personal ambitions took hold of all sorts of interest groups who deliberately sabotaged their own institution and succeeded in subverting the democratic process of changing administrations at the SLFA while seriously undermining confidence in FA’s ability to run the game. Now we have a bizarre arrangement all football administrations want to avoid – FIFA of all organisations has taken the moral high ground to put in place a very undemocratic body called Normalisation Committee to run football in Sierra Leone. The only luck we have as a nation is that the people on the committee are Sierra Leoneans with some good measure of integrity. But the real point is that we should never have reached that stage. What those who worked so hard behind the scenes to stop by sabotaging their own constitution, might happen from the look of things. The next few months should be very interesting. The fact that the FA has been out of joint has seriously affected the running of the national `team. The problem with the national team is that more than 80% of the players are aging and we don’t have any known plan in place to replace them by first blending them in with the young players. Look at what Nigeria have done. The only old player in the team is the goalkeeper. Give that team another two years and Nigeria will be on top of African football again. The local league that should serve as breeding ground for new talents is just not in session and no one can tell when it will begin. We don’t even have a complete Premier League Board to run the league. I don’t believe any of the promises about the league resuming this month. During the period of inactivity, community leagues have taken centre stage and surprisingly premier league players also take part in those very disorganised, lawless and violent community leagues. Many of the current players in the national team came through those leagues but these days the violence is too much and the whole essence of having community leagues is lost. In its place is gambling, marijuana-smoking and utter rudeness without regard for even ministers and the police. The other point I want to make is that there seems to be some uncertainty around Paul Kamara’s continuation as minister of sport and somehow he appears very tentative about pressing ahead from where he left off going into the elections. Yes president Koroma created some doubts around four more ministerial positions. The press release announcing the new cabinet following his re-election stated that other appointments will be made soon and that hasn’t happened in the area of ministerial appointments. The president didn’t confirm some old ministers like Paul Kamara in the way he did for ministries like defence, agriculture and transport. That is another reason for all the speculation. I think Paul Kamara should go ahead and do his job as minister of sport. There’s nothing much he can do. His continuation as minister rests with the president and even those confirmed in their jobs or newly appointed can be sacked at any time. He should stop thinking about the day the president took action for or against him and do his job. Whoever is minister of sport must think of innovative ways of funding and running the national team together with the SLFA. This business of taking the begging bowl all the time to commercial houses and threatening Mercury International with this and that just to get money has failed. We are tired with the constant last minute battles for funds from government that lands players in situations where they travel abroad hoping and praying that their allowances will be remitted in time to save them the embarrassment of paying their own bills while on national assignment. Funding national football is crucial and we can study how many other countries in Africa and Europe are doing it and then carefully hammer out our own approach. Football is more than an ordinary game these days. Also, the reasoning that goes into paying an absentee coach, a man of questionable credentials $ 10.000.00 per match is flawed and must change. Is this government not able to ask friendly countries to train some of our young and intelligent coaches and prepare them for the national assignment? I don’t see the difficulty in that. This should all be part of the re-building process. Let’s pay one of the old coaches half the money Olof Martesson gets and put him in a holding role. That should give us time to train three or four of the young ones and get them to take over. Pay them well, give them all the facilities befitting their job and set them targets. The nation will be behind president Koroma in that. The president says he loves young people and because many young Sierra Leoneans love football, president Koroma is an automatic convert. Now let me return to the question of whether we will be at the World Cup. I will be glad for Sierra Leone to be at the football festival in great Brazil. And that’s not because I think we can win it. It should be enough that we are among the elite nations. But I have very strong doubts we can make it. Let’s watch the outcome of the coming SLFA elections in the next few months. If we all decide to accept the result and move on in the name of the game, it will be fine. But as I said earlier, from the look of things, the outcome will disappoint many and those hardliners will launch a fratricidal war of which football will be the biggest casualty.
