In good old Africa, leadership and governance at any high level is not for the faint hearted.
People seek public office to make a mark and leave impending legacies in their respective endeavours.
Some make it while a sizeable chunk realise later much to their chagrin how murky and shark- infested the waters can get. Often times it is no walk in the park.
Football administration is no different.
Indeed as former Nigeria Football Association president Emeka Omeruah once famously quipped, football is turbulent work. It is like walking through a minefield.
If you don’t get your legs blown up, you are subconsciously playing the dreaded Russian Roulette.
Those who have held such positions can relate to that statement by the retired Air Commodore.
For the record, football administration has since time immemorial been the exclusive domain of men.
One charismatic woman has since emerged to trash that notion. She has broken those social and cultural barriers.
Isha Johansen has set it all in the beautiful game to rise to the very top of football management.
WOMAN OF FIRSTS
Isha Johansen has swum through rough tides to rise to the apex of football management in her native Sierra Leone. Born in 1965, the shrewd entrepreneur and president of the Sierra Leone Football Association is currently the only woman to serve in the coveted position and remains the only female president of a football association in the continent.
What’s more, she is only one of two to serve in the same capacity globally in recent times.
A woman of many firsts, she is the first lady to serve in FIFA’s Security and Integrity committee.
For a person who juggled her education between her country and England, she has worked overdrive to return hitherto faded hopes to football in Sierra Leone, a country that nearly descended to the dogs more than a decade ago.
Eleven ignominious years of civil war triggered by disgruntled youthful rebels out to put a halt to runaway graft and bridge the poor/elitist divide saw her country almost sink to its knees. As a patriotic and concerned citizen she armed herself with a fine blueprint and took it upon herself to redeem it through sport at one point single handedly with the help of her husband ensuring that her team FC Johansen was managed prudently with their own finances.
Her story is one that may take generations to rewrite in a continent still mired in the shackles of male leadership.
From humble beginnings and a family that has football running in its veins, Aisha drew inspiration from her father, co-founder of East End Lions FC, who patiently taught her the ropes early on by taking her with him to stadia to watch matches.
Coupled with the fact she loves the sport without coercion or cajole, her meteoric rise to the pinnacle can only be described as an act of destiny and not any favours.
Seeing what the war had reduced her beloved country to, she devised ways to help the myriads of orphaned children troop to school and get a fair crack at opportunities in life.
She cleverly dangled the carrot by promising the soccer mad kids footballs if they agreed to go back to learning centres.
With all systems going, in 2004 she went a notch higher and founded FC Johansen youth team.
Under her rigid and watchful eye, the side undertook community based programs and ultimately reward came in the form of an invite to feature in a youth tourney in Sweden.
For children who had never been out of a kilometer radius of their own rundown shanties, this was a real culture shock. Having attended numerous trainings herself to assist her handle the kids better, she had to train them how to use modern facilities like flash toilets besides teaching them how to eat using cutlery.
She took the team to Spain and America and a good number of her proteges have gone on to grace top European sides.
For a poor nation coming out of war, with very high illiteracy levels, unemployment, hopelessness and later the dreaded Ebola virus, she felt women bore the greatest brunt of all these vices.
Being the same gender, she shared the pain and agony of African and Sierra Leonean women trying to navigate through the intricacies and struggles of everyday life.
Subsequently she launched an initiative dubbed Powerplay to empower girls and women through football. The program also seeks to enlighten them in health, education and politics in a country where women education ranks low.
With many feathers in her decorated cap, she bacame the first female publisher of an entertainment magazine, founded the Pink Charity Fund for breast cancer and also the Sierra Leone Women of Excellence awards.
The Poweplay initiative aims to help free women from the never ending African chains of cultural norms and barriers. As a mother, Aisha wants youngsters equipped with vital life skills and education to stand them in good stead in their future endeavours.
Towards this end, she wholly embraces football academies that have Sierra Leone football at heart.
NO EASY ROAD
Getting to the top has not been all rosy though. Chauvinism has and still is one of her major stumbling blocks. For a society that still frowns and fidgets at the prospect of a woman presidency, her reputation has been pricked from time to time by detractors yet to stomach female leadership.
She stood against strong gambling cartels to try and make the sport clean and that is the point they tried all tricks in the book to bring her down by infilitrating her executive committee by dangling money but she remained unperturbed leading to her arrest for flimsy reasons ochestrated by the same wicked cartel who were ready to do anything to stop her drive to clean football in Sierra Leone.
From sharp instinct and for the love of her country, and to put a check to the stigma that Sierra Leone suffered at the height of the Ebola virus, she once lobbied for the top flight to be suspended to curb the spread of the deadly disease, feared to thrive in body fluids.
The wrong perception from many skeptical quarters about the football association being a cash cow to be milked at every given opportunity makes her position as president even more prone to probe.
Be that as it may, Isha Johansen has proved her mettle. She is a dedicated patriot, a football administrator-per-excellence and one woman worth emulating.
Her immense contribution to football in her native Sierra Leone and Africa at large will echo for the foreseeable future, from Cape to Cairo et al.
CAF Elections
Aisha Johansen has proved that you don’t need any favours to be at the very top and that has led CAF honchos to view her as someone that cannot be manipulated and for this reason President Issa Hayatou has used a shameful tactic of ensuring Lydia Nsekera becomes the road block meaning he has pitted a woman against a woman in a male dominated Confederation.
For starters Nsekera has her position safe at Fifa council but you wonder with her colleague vying for CAF exco member the CAF honchos want an easy ride for their person for fear of the unknown thus trying to deny Johansen the opportunity to rise and join the exco because they clearly know she is a fearless no nonsense lady.
It’s important to note she has been able to campaign effectively on her own and not depend on favours and cronyism getting a bulk of the voters on her side ready for the bruising battle that will see her take on the CAF favoured Nsekera who has benefitted from years of Hayatou leadership as everything was served to her on a silver platter.
