What comfort is there for a Free and Fair Congress?

Oct 27, 2015 Sports

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Rawle Welch
FIFA Head of Associations Primo Corvaro speaking last year during his visit to Trinidad and Tobago to assist in the reformation of their Football Association’s Constitution told the gathering of officials and the Media that President Sepp Blatter always said that, “football is representative of the society.”
With the Guyana society reeling from years of social and moral degradation, the FIFA President’s outlook could possibly hold true in Guyana’s context where the sport has suffered enormous setbacks due to extensive periods of maladministration, greed and downright discrimination.
FIFA, which is attempting to rescue Guyana’s football through a series of administrative measures, is itself mired in controversy and confusion following the suspension and indictments of the majority of its Top Brass including Blatter, his General Secretary Jerome Valcke, UEFA President Michel Platini, CONCACAF President Jeffrey Webb among others in what has to be the biggest scandal in the history of the life of the world governing body for the sport.
The FIFA Ethics Committee has to be the busiest department at the FIFA Headquarters in Zurich, Switzerland, as more and more bad news about the organisation’s indecency related to its governance surfaces every day.
The litany of accusations about fraud and bad governance is making it increasingly difficult for member Associations of FIFA to take its directives seriously and this is the dilemma that faces sober stakeholders.
It is the belief of many that right here in Guyana those charged with the responsibility of ushering in a new era in football might be thinking that with everything that is going on within the corridors of FIFA, the moment could be seized to engage in nepotism during the intricate period leading up to the November 14 Electoral Congress (EC).
The thinking might be that with the chaos engulfing FIFA’s highest echelon, the gaze that is usually fixated on controversial member associations like us could be absent.
By now, most stakeholders would have heard about the two slates that signalled their intentions to contest the EC and therefore would be using the period leading up to the voting to peruse the respective manifestos for the purpose of choosing the most suitable candidate to run the affairs of football for the next four years.
The two Presidential hopefuls Wayne Forde of Team Integrity and Nigel Hughes of Team Unity are both individuals with impeccable character with little to separate them; therefore, it will come down to the supporting casts, and this is where those who are accountable for voting should really focus on.
The Guyanese society is a closely knit one where most of the candidates are well-known in their respective endeavours and constituencies, and because we have had instances of self-interests being promoted ahead of the broader development of the sport and those who play it, it might be prudent to make those background checks for proper guidance and your vote.
The talk of the possibility of cash-for-votes has surfaced again, while a promise of preferential treatment in exchange for votes is saturating the landscape.
It is a fact that Guyana’s football setting, experiences a very volatile phase leading up to election of office bearers, it is a period where friends are lost and won and the resentment is too much to bear for some, who prefer to cower in fear than call a spade a spade.
No matter what positives have been derived from the Elite League, this initiative must not be a factor in stakeholders’ deliberations since it involves some of the best teams in the country.
No other competition was permitted to be organised during its staging, which would have determined its real pulling power. It made it impossible to arrive at an honest assessment of its true success; however this is not to say that the idea was a bad one.
Another point to note is that no member of the Normalisation Committee is eligible to run for office so whatever was done over the period of its stewardship, save and except for overseeing the implementation of constitutional reform, would have little relevance going forward.
The new Executive will have to chart its own course and only those with the will and the players’ development at heart is going to succeed. The fraternity is one still plagued by suspicion and partiality and FIFA’s current predicament is not helping the situation.
Many organisations and persons of influence have accused FIFA of being corrupt, and has presented overwhelming evidence to support those accusations so what comfort is there for a free and fair Congress in Guyana?
FIFA itself is presenting no good example of good governance and transparency, but is trying to impose such tenets among its affiliates; this is called hypocrisy.

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