When Ghana Rejects Its Best: Lessons from Kwesi Appiah and Sudan.

From Rejection to Respect

Sudan lost to Senegal this week in the ongoing AFCON, but their campaign had already made its point.

A nation broken by civil war. Players carrying personal loss. Fans watching from refugee camps and displaced shelters. And a coach, twice dismissed by Ghana, leading from afar, quietly, without spectacle.

I rarely write about football. My work usually engages governance, law, diplomacy, and constitutionalism. Yet Kwesi Appiah’s journey with Sudan is not about sport alone. It is about leadership, institutional failure, and how nations often discard competence in favour of noise.

Managing Sudan remotely from Qatar, Appiah imposed structure and belief under extreme constraints. The result was not a trophy, but something more revealing: dignity under pressure. In an environment marked by uncertainty, fragile logistics, and emotional strain, he delivered organisation and collective purpose.

I encountered him once at the Alisa Hotel in Accra shortly after his first dismissal as Black Stars coach. In the hotel’s elegant cocktail bar, amid the buzz of conversation, he sat quietly with two or three close associates, sipping tea or a soft non-alcoholic drink. There was no bitterness—only composure in his tone and restraint in his words.

That calm is often mistaken for weakness. We prefer flamboyance to discipline, optics to process. In Ghana, leadership is frequently assessed by noise and public appeasement rather than coherence and continuity. The Ghana Football Association has repeatedly hired and fired coaches to pacify sentiment, leaving deeper structural flaws untouched.

This tendency extends beyond football. Across our public institutions, we struggle to separate leadership from populism. We reward volume over vision, reaction over reflection. Competence becomes expendable when it fails to entertain or inflame. Yet institutions mature not through constant upheaval, but through patience, clarity, and trust in process.

Sudan’s exit does not diminish Appiah’s achievement; it clarifies it. Leadership is not measured solely by silverware, but by the ability to impose order, restore belief, and preserve dignity in adversity. That Sudan competed with discipline under such conditions is itself a quiet success.

Ghana does not lack talent. What we lack is institutional patience. Until competence is protected and leadership insulated from hysteria, we will continue to watch our best find respect elsewhere—only after rejecting them at home.

Sometimes leadership does not fail; institutions do. That a coach twice dismissed by Ghana could guide a war-torn Sudan to the AFCON Round of 16 is not merely a football story. It is a mirror held up to our national habits, and a lesson we ignore at our own cost.

By Seth Kwame Awuku

 

 

For more news, join The Chronicle Newspaper channel on WhatsApp: https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbBSs55E50UqNPvSOm2z

The post When Ghana Rejects Its Best: Lessons from Kwesi Appiah and Sudan. appeared first on The Ghanaian Chronicle.

Read Full Story