I recently saw a Facebook post of a sports journalist quoting the winning bonuses of some countries and that of the Ghana Black stars, and in that post, it appeared that the Black stars take the highest winning bonus as compared to some wealthy nations like Germany, America and England. Obviously, this Facebook post reechoed how unreasonable it is for a poor country to be paying its players bonuses more than its wealthier counterparts. On the surface, this concern looks legitimate and every Black star player who accepts these bonuses will be seen to be greedy and not sensitive to the needs of the nation. I don’t have a grudge with any common man on the streets like me who shares this sentiment, but my beef is with the system and the authorities who created this situation.

COMPARISONS
If we have to compare the winning bonuses of a country like Germany and the U.S.A to that of Ghana, then we must not do it in isolation from how these countries develop their talents. In a country like Germany, young talents are not left to their fate to make their own way to the top. The German football federation (DFB) takes a special interest in the welfare of every child who opts to play football. They have a special program which started around 2002 called the Extended Talent Promotion Program. Under this program, the federation has over 1,000 coaches, who have a minimum qualification of UEFA license B across the country’s 366 coaching bases. These coaches take care of the scouting and training of children between the ages 8 to 14. Apart from that, they also have 52 centers of excellence where young and promising talents are trained to become national football stars. Germany spends millions of Euros on this program every year and it was reported that the DFB and clubs spent well over 40 million Euros on this program when it started and these figures have doubled over the years. These nations like Germany spend a great deal of resources to find talents where ever they are hidden, be it a tiny village hidden behind great of wall of mountain covered by hundreds of feet of snow or a small farm cottage on the boarders of the country. They take special interest in their nutritional needs, educational needs and their overall welfare as they grow as potential members of the German national team.
What is the situation in our case when it comes to talent development? I worked as sports radio presenter in the Volta Region and I saw the predicaments of young boys who wanted to play football. I came across a team that had to weed people’s farm in the morning in order to raise money for transportation to honor their away games later in the afternoon. I also personally witnessed as a child, what the likes of Razak Pimpong, the former Black star striker had to go through as a young footballer before he left the shores of Ghana to Europe. Our Nation doesn’t care about these young men. There is no policy to make sure that they are able to stay in school while they pursue their footballing dreams. They go for practice in the morning and come to school late or leave school before school closes for practice and they are tagged truants. Eventually, they get thrown out of school. Just a handful of them make it to the top. The rest are left without an education or a trade. These are victims of a system and attacking the ones who have been able to make it the top against all odds is a crime of moral injustice. How on earth will anyone blame the victim of the system and tag them as greedy and not talk about the system that produced them?
If you don’t pay for the development of the talent like the German’s and others do, then you have to pay in full for using it when it is ripped. This is justice! After all, patriotic people also have responsibilities to take care of and a future to secure.
VICARIOUS LEARNING
As the saying goes, a nation that does not honor its heroes is not worth dying for. What became of ‘D.K Poison’? What became of Samson Lamptey? What became of Emmanuel Armah ‘Senegal’? What became of all our heroes who pushed their bodies to the extreme at each training section and match day, but never had the opportunity to play in Europe so that their clubs will pay them on behalf of Ghana? They dedicated their strength and life to Ghana virtually for free only to retire and be left to live like paupers in the country they sacrificed their strength for. These men and women who became public figures in their line of duty are left to the mockery and scorn of the same public they served.
While we do all these to our heroes, we forget that people learn from the experiences of others. Those who are smart never repeat the mistakes of others in order to avoid the undesirable consequences that come with those mistakes. It is a simple principle of learning that even animals apply.
If certain office holders in the service of this nation will not forgo their free cars, free fuel, free accommodation, 5 star hotels on national assignments, both home and abroad, with fat per diems and outrageous ex gratia when they finish serving Ghana, then let’s stop making noise about the winning bonuses of the black stars because ‘’what is good for the goose is good for the gander’’
This voice will be back.

By Kenneth Nii Yeboah
King_ken2@yahoo.com