Let’s find a solution to these funding challenges

Elsewhere in this paper is the heart-breaking story of Ghana making a late withdrawal from the IAAF World Relay Championship scheduled to come off in The Bahamas this weekend due to financial constraints.

It is not a new thing for Ghanaian teams to withdraw from competitions due to financial constraints and I am not sure this is the last of such unfortunate stories, given the dire financial constraints facing the sports sector.

Time without number, many of the less-financed sports associations have been unable to compete in international events due to the non-payment of affiliation fees or lack of money to finance such trips. 

For these less-financed sports, many of which hardly received budgetary support in the last five years and survived largely on the benevolence of philanthropists and corporate organisations, such pull outs frustrate officials whose efforts have kept these sporting disciplines alive and undermine athletes who work hard under difficult conditions in the hope of making it on the world stage. 

Ghana’s athletics chief, Prof. Francis Dodoo, lamented the fact that the withdrawal was a big blow to the federation which could not raise $20,000 to make it to The Bahamas for this weekend’s IAAF event, as Ghana’s participation would have given the athletes a fine chance to qualify for the World Athletics Championship in London.

Clearly, it is about time the country took a another comprehensive look at sports financing because some of these international competitions our athletes miss, through no fault of theirs, are a critical part of the sporting associations’ Olympic cycle and, therefore, part of preparations by our athletes for major competitions such as next year’s Commonwealth Games in Gold Coast, Australia, and the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Even for football, which enjoys better funding, it is not out of place to hear administrators lamenting the no-money syndrome, to the extent that many football clubs dread to compete in CAF competitions because such continental campaigns come with a huge financial burden.

No less a person than the Minister of Youth and Sports, Mr Isaac Kwame Asiamah, joined the chorus two weeks ago when he launched Ghana’s campaign for the 2018 Gold Coast Commonwealth Games, lamenting that the budget needed to take care of the national football teams this year alone was far more than the budgetary allocation for the ministry.

But we do not need our minister to lament like other officials; he must boldly bite the bullet and lead the way to find innovative ways to fund sports because money is critical to sports development.

 Mr Asiamah had told Parliament’s Appointments Committee during his vetting that he would not be a “football minister”, just like most ministers of sports who promised to provide equal opportunities for all sporting disciplines when, in fact, football remains the ‘spoilt child’ in the family. 

It is an open knowledge that no Ghanaian national football team has withdrawn from an international competition because of the lack of funds because somehow the state always finds resources for the teams.

Mr Minister, it is about time you walked the talk and led the way to find innovative ways to finance sports. Many such proposals by individuals and groups of experts, including the one put together by the former Ghana Olympic Committee during the Prof. Dodoo administration, which is gathering dust on the minister’s table are worth considering and implementing.

Despite an 80 per cent increase in this year’s budgetary support for sports, there is no doubt that unless alternative ways of funding are established for sustainable investment in sports infrastructure, training and competition, Ghana sports will continue to wallow in a cycle of under-development and under-achievement.