Former Sports Minister, E.T. Mensah, says there should be very good collaboration between the Ministry and the Ghana Football Association in order to solve the challenges that have come to exist between the two entities in recent months.
The latest twist in the ongoing tussle between the Ministry and the FA happened when the Sports Minister stated in an interview with Happy FM on Monday that the state would not buy tickets for Black Stars players coming to play against Rwanda in the final 2017 AFCON qualifier on Saturday.
Nii Lante Vanderpuye explained that there were no funds to fly players to play in a match which was effectively a dead rubber because Ghana had already made it to Gabon 2017. He went on to suggest that coach Avram Grant should use a team that would be made up of mostly local-based players.
In an interview on “The Game” on GH One TV on Monday evening, E.T. Mensah stated that the FA and the Sports Ministry needed to understand their respective roles and work together.
“There should be collaboration between the Ministry and the FA. This is not the first time that this has happened where people think that if you are in charge of running football, you have absolute authority and the Ministry has nothing to do except running errands between the football authority and the government for releases and so on. But that is not what it is supposed to be. There should be cooperation.”
Mensah went on to say that a Sports Minister had the right to take certain decisions in relation to the management of the national team because of the mandate given by the President who appointed him.
“I was accused in my time of interfering in national team affairs but I do not think so. Whenever a sports minister steps into any matter related to his ministry, it is not interference. I call it strategic intervention rather. He has been placed there as the man in charge and he must work. We just need to bury our pride and get the FA and the Sports Ministry to collaborate else nothing will work.”
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By: Nathan Quao/citifmonline.com/Ghana