• Kurt Okraku – GFA boss

Ghana football con­tinues to become the butt of public ridicule day-by-day and this should be a matter of grave concern to the managers of our game.

For decades now, our na­tional teams and clubs have played second fiddle to the rest of the continental game and we seem to be fine with the repulsive decomposition and disintegration.

It is sad!

Our talented local players continue to leave the scene in droves to other African countries in search of green­er pastures; others to even neighbouring Togo, Burkina Faso and Nigeria. Some, too, have found their future in countries that recovering or have just recovered from the ravages of war because of despicable remunerations.

Count the number of our players campaigning in the Sudan, Ethiopia and even Niger. Is it not pathetic?

We pay our players pea­nuts and they are all-too ready to jump onto the next bandwagon when the chance presents itself, leaving the domestic leagues poorer.

You cannot blame them. They deserve better!

Evidently, most of our stadia have had ‘ugly’ empty stands starring deep in the faces of the thinly-scattered fans around, because of the scarcity of quality players. Fans, naturally, will go to the stadia to watch quality football – and when they do not find what they want, they might turn attention to the lures of quality European football.

The Gullivers of Ghana football – Kumasi Asante Kotoko and Accra Hearts of Oak, have for a long time now struggled in Africa sim­ply because they lacked the quality and capacity to rub shoulders with their more endowed competitors.

How can it be said that the last time Kotoko (once rated best) clinched an African glory (African Clubs Championships Cup) – the equivalent of the CAF Cham­pions League, was in 1983 – 40 years ago? And, what of Hearts who last enjoyed continental glory (Confedera­tion Cup) some 19 years ago, having won the CAF Champi­ons League in 2000?

Again, how comfort­able would you feel telling a young, dyed-in-the-wool follower of the Black Stars that the last time the senior national team conquered Africa was in Libya, 1982 – 41 years back? The slump is frus­tratingly unacceptable!

After all these years of disappointments and awful­ness, stakeholders should be thinking of organising an emergency meeting to brain­storm on the way-forward of our football. Fact is that our football is almost in a coma­tose.

And, it is the reason hun­dreds of Ghanaians took to social media and condemned proposals by some uniden­tified group of people call­ing for an extension of the tenure of the GFA president Kurt Okraku, whose first term of office ends this year. The FA boss is eligible to run fora a second term. If he wins, he stays.

However, that should nev­er dominate our conversation now. We must redirect our energies to the resurgence of our ailing game, and nothing else! The standards are flak­ing off with a flight, and it is a worry!

To think that we are not even considered among the Top 10 best leagues in Africa, should be disquieting enough to spark a serious revolution in our football.

As it is done in other countries, we must woo the government to make direct investment in the football leagues, with the FA ensuring the clubs are suitably struc­tured in full compliance with the regulations on account­ability and transparency.

Indeed, there are a lot of things we are not doing right and one hopes the recent chain of reverses would blow out that sense of entitlement we have errone­ously flaunted around all this while.

We have slumbered for far too long and we got no option than to wake up now or never!