Mr Djaba Jnr

“It’s not our fault” is basically the message from the Ministry of Sports and Recreation (MoSR)

Thursday: Team Ghana arrive London late for the World Table Tennis Championship over visa issues. Saturday: Team Ghana arrive Gaborone late for the World Athletics Relays over flight issues.

The Ministry of Sports in Ghana needs to better, don’t set us for failure. If it was “black stars” flights tickets will be ready month prior to their game. 14hrs flight 16hrs lay over is not acceptable for professional athletes. We running with jet lag,no proper recovery.

“Not athletes whose times keep going in reverse.” It is clear you don’t follow the sport because this claim not only factually inaccurate, it’s actually quite disrespectful to throw this out here in spite of the contrary evidence being just a google search away. Ghana’s 100m record fell only last year, Saminu broke it. He has the third fastest 100m time of any African in history. To help you understand this in context, this means Saminu is the third fastest humanbeing in the entire history of Africa, starting from Egyptian civilization through to pre-colonial times to today. Let that simmer for a second. The relay team, this very one you’re up in arms against, set the national record in Tokyo only few months ago. That was the second fastest 4x100m time in African relay history. The context for Saminu’s rank applies here too. Think more deeply again about this. Think about all the great African relay teams in history. Only one has run faster than this Ghana team. By what logic can this be described as “times going in reverse”? They finished 4th at the world championships. Imagine finishing 4th at a global competition and calling it useless because they don’t give $12 million appearance fee there. It means you don’t appreciate the very essence of sport. By relegating relevance to only money, you completely deviate from the very soul of sporting competition. Olympic Games don’t pay a dime for medals won. I guess by your logic, that’s useless too because Black Stars bring money and Olympic Games bring nothing. By claiming you’ve seen “Black Stars do great things” since 2006, same is true for the athletes. So long as those “great things” do not include winning a trophy, every other thing is subjective and comparable. Making the quarter-finals of a World Cup isn’t greater than making the final of a world athletics championships. By whose definition is it greater? Yours? That’s subjective. When matters cannot be settled by irrefutable facts, opinions are just that; opinions. And yours is not more important than that of a farmer in Tumu. I drew more satisfaction from Ghana winning African Games relay gold in 2019, than I did with the Black Stars reaching the quarter-finals of the World Cup. To many more Ghanaians, same may be true. Who are you to say our feeling is invalid because that achievement didn’t come with millions of dollars? And quite frankly, the financial argument collapses under its own contradictions. You are the very person who routinely questions how the proceeds from our World Cup campaigns have been utilised, an admission that those funds have not been meaningfully channelled to benefit the ordinary supporter. If the supposed returns have failed to translate into tangible improvements for the Ghanaian sports fan, then the premise of “return on investment” becomes fundamentally flawed. On that basis, it is difficult to see how the same argument can now be invoked as a credible defence of continued investment in the Black Stars. One cannot simultaneously decry the misapplication of resources and, in the same breath, present those same resources as evidence of value. Such a position is inconsistent and undermines the very logic it seeks to advance.