GFA President urges IGP to create sports policing unit to tackle football hooliganism in Ghana
The President of the Ghana Football Association, Kurt Okraku, has urged the Ghana Police Service to set up a unit dedicated to policing sporting activities in the country.
With the country’s history with football violence, Mr Okraku stated emphatically that the assistance of the police is very vital in the GFA’s bid to end the canker permanently.
Hooliganism remains a major challenge for Ghana football, with a plethora of incidents recorded across various grounds nationwide last season.
The most notable of stadia hooliganism in Ghana was the loss of 127 lives when violence broke out at the Accra Sports Stadium in May 2001, during a match between the country’s two biggest clubs, Accra Hearts of Oak and Kumasi Asante Kotoko and the country is still recovering from that.
While no occurrence of such tragedy has been recorded since May 2001 at a football ground in Ghana, worrying incidents across match venues continue to happen, with more violence being witnessed in recent years.
Speaking in an interaction with the Inspector General of Police, COP George Akuffo Dampare, Mr Okraku said a department set up solely to deal with violent incidents in sport will go a long way towards tackling hooliganism in Ghana football.
“We have an opportunity to take football policing very seriously. In other established jurisdictions we have sports policing units. This tells you how important sports policing is, since football controls the hearts of millions of people,” Kurt Okraku said.
“I would be extremely happy if our new IGP and the leadership of the Police Service would also venture into creating a sports policing unit within the Police Service. That will help us a lot in the forward march of our football development,” he added.
