The Chairman of Asante Kotoko Football Club, Herbert Mensah says the demise currently facing Ghana soccer can be traced fully to the doorsteps of the controversial former Minister for Youth and Sports and National Youth Organizer of the National Democratic Congress, Mr. Enoch Teye Mensah.
"In E.T. Mensah, we had a minister who simply did not understand how to use the youth to develop the game. He rather looked at the youth as being people from his own little private army that he could misuse as opposed to developing the talents of these young ones for the benefit of the nation," he added.
Herbert and E.T were on each others throat when the latter was Minister for Youth and Sports. The two men even came close to exchanging blows.
Appearing on Ghana Television talk program, Kwaku One-on-One, the Kotoko Chairman, who is on record to have had a stormy relationship with the former Minister, said he had major altercations with E.T Mensah for trying to politicize the game and intimidate others during his tenure of office.
"I can speak my mind on these issues because at the end of the day I was not doing business with him or his government. My interests in terms of business are not Ghana-based so I do not have to kowtow to bullies like E.T. Mensah, who play with their position to enhance illegality to the point where they should have been arrested and jailed a long time ago," said Herbert, who is not a blood relative of the former Minister, although both men have similar surnames.
The Kotoko Chairman added that Ghana soccer was free of politics until E.T. Mensah assumed ministerial responsibility over the Sports Ministry and then abused the situation by politicizing Accra Hearts of Oak. Citing an instance, he said during the last election, members of the former government stood on a political platform and implied that Hearts was an NDC club with statements such as "our club is going to beat Esperance on December 17 and our party will win the elections on December 7." This, he said, did a great disservice to Accra Hearts of Oak since a lot of Hearts supporters are members of both the NPP and NDC and other minority parties just like their colleagues in Kotoko.
"We have had situations where referees have told us that they have been contracted by E.T. Mensah to ensure that the Cup, being contested in a particular match between Hearts and Kotoko, is an NDC cup and should be won by Hearts at all cost" Herbert alleged, adding that it will take Ghana soccer another five years to be rid of the legacy of E.T. Mensah.
He also spoke on a wide range of issues such as the rivalry between Kotoko and Hearts, soccer violence and the May 9 Accra Stadium tragedy where he personally led rescue attempts to save lives at the north wing of the stadium where the stampede occurred.
Delving into the problem of football administration, which is currently bedeviling the game, the Kotoko Chairman bluntly said, "although we went on a professional league, the football administration never went professional. The way our sports policy is being run now is fundamentally wrong."
He therefore suggested that there was an urgent need to get a group of persons who actually understand soccer as business administrators to raise money for the game, to promote and market the game, to improve the facilities within the game, to look after the players and ensure that their contractual obligations to Ghana as well as their clubs are attended to as well seeing to it that a host of issues especially with the education of young players are monitored.
Mr. Mensah was equally scathing on the performance of referees in local league matches and said refereeing in Ghana is a problem since their poor levels of remuneration makes it easy for their integrity to be compromised. "Last season, most referees were paid 66,000 cedis to go referee matches including their transport and their overheads. So you could actually go from Takoradi to Tamale and make a loss and come back and maybe even get beaten as well. So I think that to beat this situation, let us pay them something like half a million cedis," he suggested.
He added that Kotoko was now entering the third year of a five-year development plan and that by the end of the fifth year, the porcupine warriors would take over the premier league from Accra Hearts of Oak. "Hearts is currently up there and in the next two years they will be overtaken. There is absolutely no two ways about that. We are running a race and the intense rivalry between the two teams stems from the fact that one team knows that the slightest lapse on each side would result in being eclipsed to the background," Herbert added.
The intense rivalry resulted in the loss of 126 lives after a league match between the two teams.
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