I was shocked to hear before the break that the salary of the Black Stars coach, Kwasi Appiah, has been in arrears for six months. That is unacceptable!
In my perplexity, one question that came to mind was if such a thing could happen if an expatriate were to be in charge of the senior national team? Whatever the reason might be, it is simply unwarranted. Every effort should be made to get the Stars coach paid as early as possible.
As if that is not enough, the Black Stars’ winning bonus for the last two Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) qualifiers against South Africa and Sao Tome and Principe in November have still not been paid. So how on earth do we expect the same coach and the players to produce results for us?
I urge the Minister of Youth and Sports, Isaac Asiamah, to treat these two issues with dispatch to avoid any unnecessary pressure.
It was an open secret that the extended contract of the Black Stars coach would expire at the end of last month. So I don’t think it was necessary for the Ghana Football Association (GFA) to make any public announcement in that regard. I rather expected the GFA to treat the issue as a matter of urgency by renewing Kwasi Appiah’s contract for the sake of continuity.
In any case, I think it will be unjustifiable for the GFA and the ministry not to renew the contract of Appiah after winning his first two AFCON 2021 qualifying matches with the Black Stars. It makes no sense to me if anybody can ever think of rocking the boat with a change in the technical direction of the senior national team.
Such a decision will obviously not be in the supreme interest of the nation, as well as the Black Stars’ campaign. If the authorities care to know, Ghana’s failure to win major laurels all these years is mainly due to poor planning and the frequent changes of Black Stars coaches.
Again, it would be absurd for anybody to judge Appiah based on the Black Stars’ second round exit at the Egypt 2019 AFCON via penalties after the Black Stars Management Committee had come out to state that it would be unfair to blame the coach alone for the team’s failure to win the trophy as expected.
