By Mohamed Jaward Nyallay
Last week, some members of the Sierra Leone Football Association (SLFA) wrote a letter. The letter which was signed by Idrissa ‘Margo’ Tarawally highlighted series of points against the Isha Johansen led Executive Committee of the FA, chief among which is the delay in renewing her mandate as President.
That letter ended what looked like a truce in the ongoing wrangling among ‘football stakeholders’ in the country, the FA included. And if you are just joining us, here is a recap of where we have been before now.
The Johansen administration have overseen the FA for over six years now, two years after its original mandate expired. On her watch, there had been no national league for four and half years out of her six-year tenure. During that period, the career of hundreds of young players were either cut short or ended altogether.
The wrangling got so bitter that eventually the Anti-Corruption Commission (ACC) led an investigation against Johansen and her Secretary General, Chris Kamara. They were acquitted a year later and they went back to the FA secretariat, to business as usual. During their absence, the country was banned from international football for eight months.
This is the road football has traversed in this country, and as if that wasn’t tormenting enough, we are about to go down that road all over again.
This is Sierra Leone football for you.
In Johansen’s absence, other FA members united and finally restarted the national league. That league saw teams generate up to Le 3 billion and create more than 500 jobs for men and women who love this game.
The man who led those efforts, is Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai. He has since been sacked and the Premier League Board has been dissolved, much to the dismay of many.
Following the triumph of Johansen and Kamara in court, there was a general feeling of consensus that there is calm or even a truce.
And it is that truce that has been broken; the calm is over, and the storm is coming.
The final straw
The FA drew the first blood, even if they say it was not so. All this started when the FA announced their decision to add two more teams to the Premier League without the consent of Congress, something the head of Media and Marketing, Ibrahim Kamara said they don’t need.
“This decision is actually in line with what is interpreted in the Sierra Leone Football Association constitution. Article 34, to be precise, makes it really clear that the only body that has got the authority and the right to determine the number of teams in any competition organized under the SLFA is the executive committee,” Kamara told Politico in July, following the announcement of their decision for a 16 team league.
The constitutional argument on this vary, depending on which side you stand. What defies logic though is the decision to give those two slots to the Northern region, even when teams from other regions were already in the queue to get to the nation’s top tier league.
This decision has not come without a consequence. As it stands, there is no timeline on the new Premier League season because four members of the FA have since filed a lawsuit against the FA for that decision.
The playoffs in the Northern region has been halted by a court injunction. The presiding judge, Justice Komba Kamanda is yet to give his final ruling though.
The outcome of that case might determine when the new season will start or if there will even be a new season.
With all this going on, there is a real danger now that football might go back to slumber. And who would blame it?
The booby trap for gov’t
Some football stakeholders against the Johansen administration believe the FA’s move to get only teams from the Northern region to participate is not out of their need to strive for ‘inclusivity’ as they claim. Rather, they believe it is outright gerrymandering.
It is hard to ignore this concern; two new districts have been added to the Northern region, Karene and Falaba. This happened following the 2017 de-amalgamation process by the National Electoral Commission. As a result, the FA needs to add North-West as a new voting bloc in the future. The name of that future is ‘Congress’.
But that future is not here yet, has not been here and there is no telling when it will be. The FA is incommunicado with its members about holding a congress in the first place.
But amidst all of this, there is a bobby trap that the government must be very careful not to step in to. If it does, the debris of the explosion and the reverberation that will follow would be felt from now to the next elections in 2023.
When opposition candidate Julius Maada Bio ran against President Ernest Bai Koroma in 2012, we saw firsthand how then incumbent (Koroma) used football to tour this country, dubbed himself as Lionel Messi and eventually won the election. The irony cannot be lost on President Bio.
If for any reason the government decides to intervene into the current playoff situation, it will be doing so at its own detriment, because then, it will be very easy to frame a narrative that the Sierra Leone Peoples Party-led government doesn’t want teams in the North to play in the Premier League. In a country as gullible as Sierra Leone, that narrative can fly. It can fly from Freetown, Makeni right to Zurich, where the FIFA HQ is located.
Last weekend pictures on social media showed players and team officials in Port Loko staging a peaceful protest. They held placards with inscriptions like “Enhance President Bio’s call for national cohesion and allow the Northern region playoff”, “Northern region is part of Sierra Leone”.
Photos from a counter protest this week has also shown other set of players in perhaps another part of the country displaying placards with messages like “Football is about nationalism and not regionalism,” and “SLFA don’t favor the North against the rest”.
Football! A game that is supposed to unite a nation is now dividing it to the core.
So, what now?
As bad as it may sound, this is realistic; in the coming weeks, expect more wrangling. The cold war is over but there is no peace, for the actual war is here. In the middle of all this are the players, they will be the casualties of this war, yet again. Sad!
That letter, which was written by FA members is going to have a ripple effect on how Johansen and her executive run things. Amidst all the ensuing chaos, the big question of the moment is: can Johansen run a steady ship and unite the teams for another Premier League season?
© 2019 Politico Online
