By Isaac Massaquoi
The last leadership transition process that culminated in Isha Johansen being declared President of the Sierra Leone Football Association taught many lessons. It also destroyed the character and reputation of individuals and institutions and indeed long-standing friendships. For a very long time to come, many of the key players will be unable to recover from their self-inflicted injuries.
Nothing short of a genuine Truth and Reconciliation Commission process with a mandate going back to the period of NPRC rule will heal some wounds that are now festering in football circles. The TRC I have in mind is that which has powers to recommend limited prosecution for glaring cases of injustice and corruption like the one we have just witnessed.
I am coming at this issue from two angles: Firstly, I love football more than any other sport and I always find time to go to the national stadium to watch the local game. I am a life-long supporter of East End Lions Football Club. I must admit though that I have lost that spark that was in every supporter of what was a great club. Part of the reason is that the club has alienated itself from its grassroots supporters in favour of a strongman leadership. Such strongmen have blackmailed supporters into believing the sky would fall if they pulled out. Small donations are now irrelevant. Only the biggies.
Secondly, I was part of the original Electoral Committee set up by the SLFA to do the same job that the “Normalisation Committee” has just messed up. Looking back to my time on that committee I now understand where the whole thing was leading.
It was clear from the outset that the vested interests in the SLFA had no options to Rodney Michael who had organised his campaign with an eclectic group that included up-coming players’ agents, powerful Sierra Leonean football heroes, representatives of a growing band of militant football supporters who are fed up with seeing the same faces at SLFA headquarters and the odd people looking for jobs or some overseas travels. Some of our colleagues in the media are in that last category.
This coalition was impossible to beat. Michael’s only problem was keeping the group together after the election. He wouldn’t have had all the jobs, money, air tickets, visas and per diem to go round. And he wouldn’t have tolerated the unethical and corrupt practices that some in his group were bound to exhibit before long.
The first time I heard Johansen’s name as a possible contender, was about a week after I had accepted to serve on the electoral committee. An FA official told me Johansen was “definitely” in the race even after I had told him the lady had already endorsed Michael in comments attributed to her on two radio stations. About two weeks later, Johansen announced she would challenge Michael for the job.
Michael is a friend from our days at Fourah Bay College and the only thing I knew him for, was football. Isha I hadn’t met until we were both appointed members of the first Premier League Board headed by former Labour Minister, Alpha Timbo. She attended a few meetings and then resigned to pursue her other interests.
The main job of the electoral committee was to decide the suitability of the candidates for posts in the SLFA, in line with FIFA’s Ethics Code. Our team was headed by Lawyer Kotor Kamara. He had vast experience working with the SLFA and was part of the committee that drew up that SLFA constitution. His insights were good.
The other members were Lansana Boima who is a former referee and had applied, unsuccessfully, for the position of deputy secretary for the SLFA. He knew his way around the issues. Then there was Sallieu Kamara who had also served on what was known as the Organising Committee of the SLFA.
It was a body composed of secretaries of all first division clubs, as they were called at the time. Sallieu is one of the most honest Sierra Leoneans I know. He brought a lot of experience and candour to our deliberations.
Our decisions were based on our interpretation of the Ethics Code and the SLFA constitution and in some situations on the guidance of Abdul Rahman Swaray, the acting Secretary General of the SLFA.
We disqualified two people from the race and our reasons were clearly stated in a document that is in the public domain. We disqualified Rodney Michael for the same reasons stated by the “Normalisation Committee” and Joseph Kelfala who was running to be Mayor of Kenema. We thought politics at that level would conflict badly with football administration. I stand by those decisions. I have to say that Michael has since made very persuasive arguments about the inapplicability to his situation, of those clauses by which we judged him. I have read his case and I encourage him to put those arguments to the Court of Arbitration for Sports for a declaration with local options now exhausted.
We also dealt with petitions against Isha Johansen and Mazola Kamara. There was evidence before us that she acquired her club FC Johansen less than three years to the day she appeared before the committee which made her ineligible to run for the presidency. But the FA Secretary General called our attention to the phrase “in football administration” in the section of the constitution that Johansen’s detractors wanted to use to get her out of the race. We were shown a photograph of Johansen on the high table with Nahim Khadi, the most ineffective SLFA leader, behind Saramadi Kabbah at a youth football match. She told us that her team was involved in that final match in 2006. A banner on the wall at the playground had a date in 2006 inscribed. The Secretary General told us that in line with the SLFA constitution, that team and a match like that put Johansen “in football administration” as far back as the date on the wall.
I remember asking him if I would be considered to be “in football administration” if I went to Dwarzark Farm and organised some local youths to play a six team round-robin league for example. “Yes” came the reply. There were doubts in the room but we decided to stand on the Secretary General’s understanding of the constitution and some letters of accreditation prepared by the SLFA to give Johansen an opportunity to fight for the job. It was a similar situation for Mazola Kamara whose work with the football heroes and occasional visits to Sierra Leone from his base in America cleared him to run.
On the side of Foday Turay, we completely dismissed the petitioners that accused him of involvement in sport betting because the petitioners, Murray Town Rovers had no legs to stand on, under the SLFA constitution. In Fact we didn’t consider recommending people for a job, which selling mercury tickets truly is, as enough reason to declare someone as being involved in sport betting. There was no evidence Turay was getting money from those he recommended for the mercury job. To us, it was like calling a man who stands as surety for somebody accused of stealing money, a criminal. The same would apply to John Dissa.
Mohamed Kallon’s case is so clear that only God and those on the “Normalisation Committee” know why they disqualified him. I understand that Primo Corvaro, the FIFA man on whose watch the whole fraud unfolded, described Kallon’s disqualification as a “mistake”. He had enough time to correct it. But for some strange reason, he endorsed the mess.
This process was always going to be manipulated to benefit the candidate that was acceptable to the maverick SLFA old guard. It should have gone ahead after the Appeals Committee, made up of three lawyers overturned our disqualification of Rodney Michael. But the SLFA planners played their next card to stop that. Nahim Khadi who, during his presidency spent more time in England than in Freetown, suddenly resigned and encouraged other executive members to do the same to trigger a constitutional crisis and give corrupt FIFA an excuse to bring in a “Normalisation Committee” that somebody at the SLFA had told me about even before we started work.
I feel very bad at the way the Minister of Sport, Paul Kamara handled the whole election affair. And there was a period when President Ernest Bai Koroma had an opportunity to help the situation. The president could have re-assigned Kamara away from that ministry because he was now incapable of being fair to all the players by his public pronouncements. The president chose not to.
Now, many people are hypocritically asking Kallon and others to move on in the interest of the game. But some of the messengers, from journalists to politicians and others in the bogus “football family” have blood on their hands and cannot be trusted.
The biggest losers are those who love football and at the same time believe that justice must prevail at all times.
For more on the shenanigan that has happened in the SLFA culminating in the recent wishy-washy and farcical election, join me again next Tuesday.
(C) Politico 13/08/13
