Isa and Swarray Should Also be Reconciled

Commentary

The news that Political Affairs Minister Kemoh Sesay has resolved the acrimony and rancour between the President of the Sierra Leone Football (soccer) Association Isa Johansen (photo) is nothing but good news.

Isa went unopposed as President last year when elections were held for the executives of the country’s highest soccer body. Her main opponent, soccer maestro Mohamed Kallon, was disqualified because he had spent very little time inside the country as an international soccer star. One of the SLFA rules is that to become President or any other top position in SLFA, you have to spend considerable time in the country to really understand the soccer intricacies and problems.

Since then Isa and Kallon have been at loggerheads culminating in a recent incident at a soccer match where Isa was said to have slapped Kallon. In her defence, Isa, a feisty and no-nonsense woman operating in what many people in Sierra Leone consider a man’s world, said Kallon violently pushed and insulted her in full public view. So the slap was self-defence, she insisted.

To avoid a messy situation, Minister Kemoh Sesay, who says to intervene in such situations is part of his Ministry’s mandate, quickly resolved the issue with Kallon and Isa shaking hands and hugging each other at a meeting he called in his office.

But there is another person the Minister should reconcile with Isa (if he has not already done so) and that is the Secretary-General of SLFA Abdul Rahman Swarray, who had been a strong and loyal Isa supporter until recently when they had daggers drawn for reasons that PV has not yet been able to unearth. Swarray has been involved in soccer for a long time as a sports reporter for various newspapers for about two decades and recently as a lecturer in the Mass Communications department at the university of Sierra Leone as well as being SLFA Secretary-General. He is well-known to many international soccer administrators including those in CAF (Confederation of African Football) and FIFA. He is in fact a CAF official.

So we call on Minister Sesay to reconcile the two for the benefit of soccer in Sierra Leone which is yet to develop to the level of the majority of African countries.