A member of Occupy Ghana, Sydney Casely-Hayford has described as rather confusing and pretentious, the apology of embattled Ghana Football Association Boss, Kwesi Nyantakyi following an expose on corrupt dealings he supervised under his tenure as President.
Mr. Hayford, speaking on CitiTV’s analysis programme, ‘The Big Issue’ Saturday questioned why Nyantakyi would apologise for his actions when he very well was in the knowing when he engaged in each corrupt act.
He believes it is pretentious that anyone will apologise after being ‘caught’ in an act.
“Why is he apologizing and giving all these long long long excuses. He was scammed and so he lost all his faculties because he was scammed? Somebody comes and offers you $65,000, you take it, bag it and carry it and then you are complaining about scamming?”.
Mr. Hayford likened the latest revelations to Ghana’s disastrous Brazil 2014 World Cup Campaign and issues that followed, necessitating the setting up of a commission of enquiry; the Dzamefe commission. The Commission which was set up by Former President John Mahama after Ghana’s exit from the 2014 World Cup to find reasons for the poor performance uncovered a number of issues including several cases of alleged embezzlement of state funds as well as the reason behind the infamous airlifting of 3 million dollars to pay Black Stars players.
According to Mr. Hayford, such happenings have had room as a result of the inability of persons in leadership to hold accountable and sanction individuals they find engaging in corrupt activities at any given point in time.
“I know that we are all trying to blame this on a bigger issue we have in the country but you see when you persistently allow people to get away with things like this, you will get to this point all the time, everytime!!”
“Have you forgotten the dzamefe commission? Grown up people went to cry like babies and we had a whole seasoned judge sitting there and allowing them to carry on like that, even offering them tissue, he should have walked them out.
“That’s no place to come and shed crocodile tears. Dzamefe should have understood that all they were doing is what Nyantakyi is doing now, rendering an apology after the facts as a way out of the dilemma. At the end of the day what happened with Dzamefe and that commission? Isn’t the report still sitting there? What was the end result?. How then do you expect that the people of Ghana will sit down and think, we have to be upright citizens?” he posited.
He believes the outrage of Ghanaians following the screening of Anas’ ‘Number 12’ documentary is not as related to the level of corruption they witnessed as it is to how violated they feel having realized that their teams were cheated severally leading to the loss of many matches.
“This that Anas has done, Ghanaians have started expressing anger etc. not because of the corruption at GFA but they are outraged because they can’t believe that all the matches that are played are somehow tainted, this is what is hurting them….The outrage is the fact that you feel violated with all of this, what you believed will happen and the outcomes of all of this and then you go and it is the opposite and now they are asking themselves, did we genuinely win?”….You must know that there’s a whole lot of corruption seeping in. The local market, the local sports of football in this country is in complete shambles. Let’s grow up in this country for a change”, he said.
Casely Hayford’s comments come on the back of an apology from the camp of resigned GFA Boss, Kwesi Nyantakyi who among other things apologized in a released statement, to the President of Ghana and Ghanaians as a whole.
His apology and resignation come a day after the government announced a dissolution of the Ghana Football Association and hours after FIFA banned the embattled football president for 90 days.
Nyantakyi was captured in an investigative piece by ace journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas taking an amount of $65 million from investors to influence some matches. Other officials of the GFA and NSA were also captured engaging in bribery in corruption in the video.
