Nyantakyi’s wife speaks on Number 12

Christine-Marie Nyantakyi, the first wife of Kwasi Nyantakyi, former President of the Ghana Football Association (GFA), who’s serving a life ban by Fifa, has in her first public commentary on her husband’s fall from grace to grass admitted that an amount of $100, 000 was paid to stop the screening of the Anas documentary.

Speaking on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana on Tuesday, she explained that her husband has only been sanctioned by Fifa for breaking its code of ethics and that there are no criminal findings against him.

She said that ahead of the screening of investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas’ Number 12 documentary, which exposed her husband as a bribe-taker, blackmailers had demanded they pay $150,000 as bribe to kill the story.

Mrs Nyantakyi told Paul Adom-Otchere on Metro TV’s Good Evening Ghana programme on Tuesday, 6 November that: “… Apparently, we became so desperate when we realised that all that they presented to us were false, so, we tried to make some interventions, and they proposed that he pays some money. They proposed $150,000; my husband couldn’t afford it, so, he gave out $100,000 dollars, and they came back to him and said the person says you need to add $50,000, and he said: ‘Well, I don’t have it’; that’s all that I have’.”

Asked by Paul why she thought her husband fell for the bait, she said; “I don’t know what they did to him. My husband is a very skeptical person; I don’t know what they did to him to follow them like that. You don’t just get him to follow you like that.”

Mrs Nyantakyi even suggested her husband could have been put under a spell.