World Cup Enquiry: ‘Commission has power to recommend sanctions’

The chairman of the Presidential Commission of Inquiry into the Brazil 2014 World Cup, Justice Senyo Dzamefe, has explained that the commission has the power to recommend sanctions against people whom adverse findings will be established after its work.

He said after that the government had to decide either to implement the recommendations of the commission or ignore it.

Justice Dzamefe was speaking at the commission’s sitting in Kumasi last Wednesday when most people wanted to know the sanctions that would be meted out to people perceived to have misconducted themselves at the expense of the nation.

He said the commission decided to extend its sitting to other regions to allow others to express their views and offer suggestions on how football should be managed in the country in order to be incorporated into the commission’s final report.

Most of the people, sports presenters and sports enthusiasts who appeared before the commission recommended that the payment of appearance fee for Black Stars players should be abolished and the winning bonus should also be reduced.

They contended that even the developed nations, most of which had been assisting Ghana financially, paid their players less and wondered why “we should be paying our players more.”

Richard Acheampong of Angel FM, for instance, gave the example of Nigeria which used to pay her players $10,000 as winning bonus for home matches and $15,000 for away matches but had reduced it to a flat rate of $5,000 and asked those who would not accept it not to respond to the call when selected.

The speakers also bemoaned the overconcentration of attention on the Black Stars to the detriment of the other national football teams, especially the female footballers.

They asked the government to focus on other disciplines and to invest in the development of infrastructure at the local level to ensure that the nation had a pool of talents to select from.

Some of them also suggested that a portion of the winning bonuses to be paid to the Black Stars should be put aside for investments as pertained in other jurisdictions.