The Ministry of Youth and Sports is seriously cash strapped, the sector Minister, Nii Lantey Vanderpuye has stated.
As a result, he said the ministry has been “struggling to respond to the demands of the GFA [Ghana Football Association]” and that it cannot pay the bonuses of the Black Stars’ foreign based players.
The Ministry recently told the GFA that it does not have the needed funds to purchase tickets for the Black Stars foreign based players to travel to Accra for the 2017 Africa Cup of Nations qualifier against Rwanda— as a result, Black Star’s Deputy Skipper Andre Ayew has offered to buy the flight tickets.
The decision by the ministry to shirk its responsibility stirred up both positive and negative responses from the general public.
Defending the ministry’s decision, Mr. Vanderpuye said that the move by the West Ham player is a laudable one.
“That’s a very patriotic duty,” he said in an interview with Accra based Joy FM Tuesday.
“I have called on that several times that if the players always want to be patriotic enough, nationalistic enough and so make sacrifices—we are all making sacrifices. If they want to do that, they want to pay their own airfares, come and play [and] after the match, we will say thank you to them and then they leave, fine!” he added.
The ministry, he further revealed will not be paying the bonuses of the foreign based players coming to play the qualifying match with Rwanda.
He, however, explained the ministry will be able to pay the bonuses of the local players they are requesting that the GFA use in the forthcoming match.
“We have limited resources that would have made us pay something to those local players that we are requesting that they use,” stated Mr. Vanderpuye.
“To avoid the complications,” he continued “we don’t have funding to pay plane tickets; we don’t have funding to pay the amount of money we pay as winning bonuses to foreign based players.”
The GFA’s Director of Communications, Ibrahim Sanni Daara, told Starr Sports in an interview that “the Black Stars players themselves have decided in a massive show of patriotism that they want to pay for their own tickets to come for the match.
“However, there are some players who are unable to afford the tickets and for that Andre Ayew has decided that he will pay for them to turn up for the game.”
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