Ghana’s hockey chief Richard Akpokavie, has bemoaned the unfair allocation of resources by the Ministry of Youth and Sports to football to the detriment of other sporting disciplines in the country.
Mr Akpokavie, President of the Ghana Hockey Association, observed that the ministry had shown total bias in the distribution of the national cake, by allocating a chunk of the sports budget to the Black Stars while other sports suffered neglect.
In an interview with the Daily Graphic, Mr Apokavie said a handful of officials from the Ghana Football Association and the ministry shared a whooping $577,500 as honorarium for managing the Black Stars’ participation in the FIFA World Cup in Brazil, the hockey federation had not received a pesewa from its allocation from the 2014 sports budget.
Last year, a similar situation occurred when hockey was denied its share of the sports budget, a situation Mr Akpokavie described as undermining meaningful and sustainable development of the sport in the country.
“Apart from football, the government, through the Ministry of Youth and Sports, has not given any money from our budget allocations for 2013 and 2014 to any sports discipline in Ghana. All attention is fully centred on soccer and the Black Stars, in particular. This is not good enough for the development of sports in the country.
“We think the ministry must ensure that for the budget for sports, football gets its portion, but we in the other sports must also get our portion of the allocation for the year,” he noted
In his view, the sports budget was meant for the development of all sports in Ghana, but not soccer alone as the Ministry had been doing over the years.
“The present situation where all attention is totally focused on soccer is an indication that all our young men and women who play other sports are losing out, so when we concentrate only on soccer, we are not sending the right message to our youth,” he said.
Commenting on the effect of neglecting other sports, especially hockey, he said hockey sticks and other kit for goalkeepers were very expensive, hence the need for the Sports Ministry to be fair in its budget allocation to galvanise those interested in the sport to nurture and develop their potential for the betterment of Sports in Ghana.
“ It is, therefore, our hope that the Ministry will be passionate for other sports and give only a portion of next year’s budget to football, while other sports get their share to accelerate the development of other sports,” he stressed.
