A satirical column in the Ghanaian Times revisits the moment GFA chairman Samuel Nana Brew-Butler dissolved the association’s management committees after officials out-earned the Black Satellites in Australia.
A newly published column has pulled a familiar Ghanaian football story back into view: the day a Ghana Football Association (GFA) chairman wiped out the association's management committees because officials were collecting fatter allowances than the players.
The piece, written by Emmanuel Amponsah, a former Editor of The Spectator, appears in the Ghanaian Times and is written as satire rather than as a news report. But it rests on an episode many older football followers will remember.
What happened in 1993
That year, the Black Satellites — Ghana's national Under-20 team — travelled to Australia for the FIFA World Youth Championship, the global tournament for players under 20. The side beat England on their way through the competition and finished with a silver medal, one of the strongest showings by a Ghanaian team at that level.
According to the column, when the team returned home the accounts from the trip landed on the desk of the newly appointed GFA chairman, Samuel Nana Brew-Butler. The figures showed that members of the management committee that travelled with the team, led by Paul Kunke, had taken home considerably more in allowances, or per diems, than the young players who actually played the matches.
Per diems are the daily living allowances paid to officials and athletes on international assignment. They are a recurring flashpoint in Ghanaian sport, which is why the 1993 example has stayed in circulation for more than three decades.
The response
Brew-Butler's answer, the column says, was blunt: he dissolved all the GFA's management committees. The writer presents this as a one-stroke clean-up aimed at making the point that football money should go first to the people playing football.
The column names two players from that era, Augustine Ahinful and Samuel Osei Kuffour, to contrast the physical demands on the squad with the comforts enjoyed by travelling officials.
Why it still gets retold
The writer argues that the 1993 purge remains a reference point for what he calls "Committee-itis" — his term for delegations in which officials outnumber athletes and administrative spending outpaces money for training and equipment.
For Ghanaians abroad who follow national teams from a distance, the complaint is a familiar one. Questions about the size and cost of official delegations resurface almost every time a Ghanaian team travels for a major tournament, and they often dominate the conversation as loudly as results on the pitch.
The column does not report any new GFA decision, investigation or policy change. It is a look back, offered as commentary on how allowances and delegation sizes are handled in Ghanaian sport today.
