MoYS dismisses claims over late arrival of equipment

• Mustapha Ussif -Sports Minister

The Minister of Youth and Sports, Mustapha Ussif, has dismissed claims by some members of Team Ghana at the ongoing African Games that they did not receive equipment and kits for their respective events.

He was responding to claims by a section of cyclistsand badminton players that they were affected by the lack of equipment to train adequately for them to compete.

At a press conference organised by the Ministry of Youth and Sports (MoYS) and the Local Organising Committee (LOC), in collaboration with Team Ghana federation heads, Mr Ussif stated that the complains of the athletes were untrue.

“We requested from the various federations, the type of equipment they needed for the Games. When they submitted the list, we went through with them before procuring and delivered to them.”

“In some cases, we chased the athletes for their sizes and it took forever to get these requests from them. There are times lines to meet to get these gears and equipment down to Ghana, so

sometimes the challenges don’t come from the Sports Ministry or the LOC.”

Furthermore, some of these federations take the items and instead of giving them to the athletes, they take it and do not hand them over to the athletes, he said.

According to him, Ministry spent half a million dollars to procure international standardised equipment for the basketball federation alonefor the Games and beyond.

“This is something we should be proud of as a country that for the legacies of the African Games, we would have more modern and standard equipment for our various federations to use for training for future events.”

On the issue of the power outage at the Cape Coast stadium during the Black Princesses’ game against their Ethiopian counterparts last Saturday, Mr Ussif described the incident as unfortunate and noted that the Ministry together with the LOC engaged all stakeholders concerned for the Games and gave them the schedules.

The Minister tasked Ghanaians and the media to focus more on the positives because there was a lot to report and talk about in order to help push the country and the Games.

“Every internationalorganisation official that we have engaged so far is applauding Ghana for a very spectacular African Games, so let us all come together to position Ghana as the sports destination we are all yearning for.”

BY RAYMOND ACKUMEY