By Alpha Abu
For over seven years now football administration in Sierra Leone has been dogged by intrigue and unending rift amongst people who were supposed to ensure that sanity reigns in the game. People who much was expected of whether by omission or commission stifled the progress of the game by inventing counter-productive measures or resorting to sometimes crude destructive tactics to bury the ambitions of perceived opponents just to maintain the status quo.
And we cannot hide from the glaring fact that politics largely contributed in killing the game and further polarising what was supposed to be a football family. The state actors interfered with everything connected with the Sierra Leone Football Association (SLFA), spurred by the primordial motive of having unchallenged influence within the FA to advance their selfish interests rather than the development of the sport. This period of senseless rancour amongst supposed key stakeholders of football even affected the prospects of young talented players trying their luck with clubs abroad. Football stopped playing altogether and so acrimonious was the climate that even the game’s world governing body FIFA got entangled and bogged down in the debacle.
The Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai led premier league board conducted what was the one and only league in 2018-19 that saw an encouraging turnout by fans since 2013, rather indicative of just how starved the people were of their favourite past time. The league that subsequently followed was cut short by the covid-19 outbreak but comparatively the euphoria that greeted the preceding one far outweighed last year’s. Both though at the end were not spared controversy over club representation at continental competitions, further revealing how deep seated the problem is within.
However last December heralded the surprising news that seven of the fifteen men who were being investigated for years on alleged match-fixing and unpatriotic conduct had been cleared of any wrong doing by a newly constituted FA Ethics Committee, giving those absolved the opportunity to partake in football related issues once more. It was understandably hard though for some of the men to take, considering the damage done to their reputation for what have now turned out to be baseless accusations. Well naturally People now expect to hear also about the status of the other eight. The news about Rodney Michael and the other six individuals was like placing a soothing balm, with its temporary remedial solution, on a problematically aching part of the body, as events few weeks later will prove. On the final day for nominations ahead of the SLFA elective Congress last Friday, some members of the Urban District Football Association had their applications rejected on the grounds that they didn’t submit minutes of their last meeting. Sierra Leone’s celebrated football legend Mohamed Kallon was one of those affected by the secretariat’s action. The long and short of it is that the status of football in Sierra Leone has been topsy-turvy and we have hardly seen tranquillity prevail for even a year. It has always been drama after drama. Our hope is that the Congress to take place in Makeni on the 27th February 2021 will eventually provide delegates the opportunity to right the wrongs that had festered for far too long, which they can do by electing people who will unite the football family and bring back sanity which was such a rare phenomenon through what were very turbulent years.
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