THE president of Ghana Football Association has no pact with his Nigerian counterpart, Amaju Pinnick, with respect to the Confederation of African Football (CAF) election coming up in three months,Tribunesport has been informed.
The 39th CAF Ordinary General Assembly will be held on March 16, 2017 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, where the president of the Nigeria Football Federation Amaju Pinnick hopes to secure a CAF Executive Committee seat by the election that will take place that day.
A recent report had said that in order to secure the seat, Pinnick had entered into a pact with Mr Kwesi Nyantakyi, president of the Ghana Football Association. The pact between Pinnick and Nyantakyi, the report stated, would see the latter step down for Pinnick to go through in the CAF election, while he (Pinnick) would support Nyantakyi for his re-election into the FIFA Council, also in March.
By CAF’s regional delineation, Nigeria and Ghana are both in the same zone (zone 3), known as Zone West B.
But while speaking to Tribunesport, Chief Ganiyu Bakare, Special Adviser to the Ghana FA boss, after a discussion with his principal, who also granted him his permission, spoke to Tribunesport and said no pact exists between Nyantakyi and Pinnick on the upcoming election.
According to Chief Bakare, a Nigerian from Inisa, Osun State, “Nyantakyi himself was surprised at that report because there is nothing like that. He has no pact of any sort with Pinnick on the CAF election.”
The only discussion Pinnick had with Nyantakyi on the election, according to Chief Bakare, was casual, “typical of a build-up to an election, where Pinnick just told Nyantakyi that he would need his (Nyantakyi’s) support in the election. Nothing more,” Chief Bakare, a member of Black Stars management committee told Tribunesport by phone from Accra, Ghana.
The said report also claimed that towards the election, there has been a close alliance between Pinnick and Nyantakyi in recent times. To back the claim, the report quoted a source as saying that the NFF president flew the Ghana FA boss on his chattered flight from Cameroon, after the final of the last Women’s Africa Cup of Nations, to Nigeria, where they both attended a sports awards ceremony together.
But Chief Bakare said there was nothing like that as Nyantakyi was not even in Cameroon for the Women’s Africa Cup of Nations in the first place, though he added that his principal was in Nigeria recently, his discussion with Pinnick did not touch on the CAF election.
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