Prioritize Sports Business: Dr. Ernest Koranteng’s letter to Ghana’s new Sports & Recreational Minister

Dear Hon. Kofi Iddie Adams,

 

The mandate of the revised Sports & Recreational Ministry may not be explicit about prioritizing SPORTS as a BUSINESS, the necessary private sector participation and public interest consideration in decision making.

 

 

BUT, that is how it MUST be, Sir.

 

I humbly encourage you and your team to consider and approach to managing GHANA SPORTS as a BUSINESS as part of your resetting plan. To restructure, rebrand and reposition Ghana Sports as a viable business that make economic, social, lifestyle, emotional and livelihood sense, you may want to consider an approach that ensures the following:

 

• Professionalism and competitiveness across sporting disciplines, even if football will continue to be the dominant passion of the nation.

 

• Engineering private sector involvement whiles galvanizing public interest in sporting activities towards achieving economic, social, lifestyle, emotional and livelihood satisfaction for all.

 

• Acknowledging that public interest is the biggest investor or reason any individual, group or organization will invest a ‘penny’ in sports, so, what engineers ´PUBLIC INTEREST’ should be duly explored and ensured. This is the reason sports is working anywhere you may have read about or seen.

 

• Public interest, acceptance, patronage and spending are the catalysts to building and sustaining any thriving sporting industry. When we get that right nothing will stop Ghana Sports from becoming as competitive as expected.

 

• To be sincere, sanitize, and strategically allocate government spending in areas that generate the required results across agreed metrics with the view of empowering sports federations and associations to be self-sustaining whiles reducing the over-reliance on ‘GOVERNMENT’ for the financing of national teams across sporting disciplines.

 

Please NOTE that successive governments have made massive investments time and time again in sports through the provision of infrastructure and expending on national teams appearances in regional and international competitions.

 

I pray we do things differently this time, prioritizing SPORTS BUSINESS above Business as Usual!

 

Thank you.