Ghana last hosted the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) in 2008 with pride. Today, we cannot even host ourselves. We scramble for approval for our deteriorated pitches, called stadiums, from the Confederation of African Football (CAF).
In September 2024, CAF inspected Baba Yara Sports Stadium after Ghana’s game against Angola and withdrew its licence. The reason? An unsuitable playing field.
Our historic 24-year unbeaten home record in Kumasi ended not because Angola was better, but because our own grass betrayed us. Even their coach, Pedro Gonçalves pitied us and said a country like Ghana deserved better pitches. That pity was louder than any insult.
In Accra, the nation’s premier stadium, the Presidential Entrance, the place where Presidents should walk is now a certified dumping yard. Faulty fridges, broken chairs, rusted machines, obsolete gadgets and pure waste. Journalists toured the facility and found exposed wires, electrical rooms with no lights, rat holes, cracked walls and washrooms with an unbearable stench.
And this, ladies and gentlemen, is the only stadium CAF still manages to tolerate in Ghana. The best of our worst.
Where are the stadiums?
Baba Yara? Closed.
Essipong? Closed for years.
Cape Coast? Tired and limping.
Aliu Mahama? Don’t even go there.
We have five national stadiums. Zero is fully fit. If stadiums were students, Ghana would have repeated the class five times.
So what has the National Sports Authority (NSA) been doing since 2006? That is when FIFA World Cup money started flowing — prize money, sponsorship, broadcast rights and government releases.
Nearly 20 years of cash flow.
Yet every single season, we do the same comedy ritual: leave the pitch to die like an abandoned farm, wait until a CAF inspection is two weeks away, panic, call the Ghana National Fire Service to come and water the pitch like we are extinguishing a bushfire in Ejura.
A few pitches have sprinklers, of course, but someone still has to walk onto the pitch to open them. Then we get some paint, smear it on the grass to make it look neat and green, and call it maintenance.
You can’t make this up.
It is a shame.
Where is the long-term accounting for the long-term millions?
Every year, we hear that the government has released X million cedis for renovation.
Renovation of what?
The same toilet? The same rusted gate?
Because on the ground, we don’t see renovation. We see repainting.
This is not simply incompetence. This is a maintenance culture crisis dressed in Kente as incompetence.
We renovate only when cameras are coming. We maintain only when embarrassment is near. We fix only when CAF threatens a ban.
And the cost is not just embarrassment. It is real.
Black Stars playing home games on desert-like pitches. The two biggest teams in the country, Asante Kotoko and Hearts of Oak, begging to use other people’s stadiums to play games. Players risking ACL injuries on bare, hard patches because the ball cannot roll properly. Fans paying money to watch anti-football because the pitch kills every pass.
Newly appointed Asante Kotoko head coach Eric Tinkler complained recently about Baba Yara after a Democracy Cup game.
Some local coaches told him to adapt.
Adapt to what?
Adapt to mediocrity?
Adapt to rat holes?
Poor pitches are not Ghanaian culture. They are institutional failures.
CAF will not accept “adapt” as an answer when inspecting stadiums for 2027 AFCON qualifiers. They will just ban us again.
And we will, again, act shocked.
The question now is: Mr Sports Minister, Mr NSA boss, Mr GFA President — we are not asking for the Bernabéu. We are not asking for Wembley.
We are asking for green grass that can be watered without calling 192.
We are asking for toilets that do not chase fans away.
We are asking for one, just ONE, stadium that does not get banned every six months.
One stadium where the lights work, wires are not exposed and the Presidential Entrance is not a refuse dump.
If we cannot maintain our stadiums after 68 years of independence, we should stop calling them national assets.
They are national liabilities.
Monuments of how we love to commission projects but hate to maintain them.
Until we fix that culture, every CAF ban is not an insult.
It is a mirror.
And the mirror is saying: Ghana, look at yourself.
This is about a country that loves cutting sod and hates holding a broom.
We will spend 200 million to build, but not 2 million to maintain.
We will fly officials business class to inspect stadiums in Morocco, but we cannot buy a modern sprinkler system that a basic academy in Senegal owns.
We have normalised failure so much that a dusty pitch with paint sprayed on it now looks okay to us.
Our stadiums have been abandoned by leadership that sees them only as venues for political rallies, funeral receptions and December concerts.
You collect rent for all those events, but the money never touches the grass.
The toilets remain broken. The floodlights remain dead. The scoreboard remains blind.
If the Baba Yara pitch could talk, it would beg for retirement.
It is tired of being disgraced every six months for the cameras.
We will do what we always do.
Wait for CAF to ban us.
Hold a press conference.
Promise a world-class renovation.
Slash some weeds.
Paint the walls.
And call it commissioning.
Until the next ban.
Ghana football does not need another sod-cutting ceremony.
It needs someone who knows how to water what we already have without calling the water trucks.
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Story by Xavier Mensah | univers.ug.edu.gh
Edited by Erica Odeenyin Odoom
