By Andrew Warshaw
August 7 – At a time when FIFA is promoting greater representation among women on its executive committee, Isha Johansen has become only the second active female leader of a national governing body after being appointed as president of the Sierra Leone Football Association.
But in classic African football politics, her elevation to the post was not without opposition and anger in some quarters.
Johansen was elected unopposed but only after FIFA endorsed a decision by the Sierra Leone authorities to disqualify three other candidates – Mohamed Kallon, Rodney Michael and Foday Turay – from standing.
All three boycotted the ballot in protest at their expulsion and have refused to endorse Johansen as new SLFA President.
The elections had been embroiled in controversy for almost a year and prompted deep divisions. Her first task will be to ensure the resumption of league football in the West African country after clubs reportedly staged a boycott in the wake of the bans handed to the three rival presidential candidates.
“We can work together because I don’t have all the ideas – I appeal for the anger to stop,” Johansen said. “In the next three months we’ll be holding an extraordinary conference to map out the way forward, we’ll have a blueprint.”
And in further remarks to the BBC, she added: “My focus now really is to try to bring some semblance of sanity and peace into the football and we can move forward. I’ve never been big on words, I’ve never been big on promise, I don’t do that. I actually implement, I actually do things.
“But in order to get anything done, even if it’s a short-term plan, you have to bring sanity, integrity and discipline within your system, your working environment, and right now that’s really not really the situation.”
The 48-year-old is the only current female national FA president in world football apart from Lydia Nsekera of Burundi who became the first woman ever elected to the inner sanctum of FIFA at its Congress in Mauritius in May. Two other women were also co-opted on to the FIFA executive committee, in their case for one year, as world football’s governing body attempts to embrace greater transparency as part of its reform process.
In all, Johansen is the third female boss of an African football association after Izetta Wesley of Liberia and Burundi’s Nsekera. She urged her rivals to “lay down their arms” and join the common cause. “I am looking forward to a more healthy and renewed football in Sierra Leone,” she told reporters in the capital Freetown.
“I think that jointly we can make a formidable force in football. We have, as a nation, come a long way, we have the emotional scars and a physical scars to prove that senseless wars don’t yield anything and for me that this is happening now in football is rather senseless.
“I think that my coming to football as a woman can open global doors, which have been shut on us because people still perceived us as that doom and gloom war-torn country which we are not.
“People should expect a president who will encourage the development of football, bringing in more education, as there are so many young kids who want to play football but don’t want to go to school. We shall also see female football grow.”
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