Nkawkaw Park needs facelift

Abandoned project: Dressing rooms at the Nkawkaw Park. 

I have visited the Nkawkaw Park five times since 2005. My first was the last time Okwawu United hosted Kotoko in a Premier League match. My second visit was in the 2006/07 season, when Kotoko played Olympics also in a league match at the time the Baba Yara Sports Stadium was being renovated for the AFCON 2008.

Subsequently, I have made two more visits to the venue to cover friendly matches between Kotoko and lower division clubs. In all my visits, I haven’t seen conditions at the famous Nkawkaw Park improving. Instead, they have been deteriorating. The Park, if it were human, would have been retrogressing in life. That saddens me as a local football enthusiast.

Maybe, this is no news given the kind of country we live in. It's no news because, even well-built stadia, like the Accra Sports Stadium and the Sekondi  Sports Stadium, which host international matches are all being left to rot. So why the bother about a town Park that is not a premier league centre?

The state of affairs at the Nkawkaw Park truly might be no news to most Ghanaians because the country has a very bad maintenance culture. That sub-culture is so ugly that, it seems we are a people who love to see things ruined or deteriorate before we attempt to take any action to remedy the situation. Well, not all of us are like that, I must point out. But really, the Nkawkaw Park, which I'm complaining about, isn't the only sports facility in Ghana, which has been carelessly abandoned.

It hurts to make the point that, our sports authorities and some club football managers seem to have become accustomed to watching the game on terrible match venues to the extent that, their conscience isn’t be pricked when they see teams playing on those rough pitches every day.

It's sad and disappointing especially if you think about how loud we are about being a passionate football nation yet we are not making serious plans to build good infrastructure to support the development of the game. I know people who will quickly refer to the recently commissioned Cape Coast Stadium, which I must admit is a plus, but please, that doesn't change my argument.

There’s a lack of basic infrastructure for our game and sadly a good maintenance culture. On my visit to the Nkawkaw Park on Saturday for the Storm Academy-Kotoko FA Cup match, I was initially taken aback by the condition of the road leading to the Park. The bumpy, dusty ride to the Park was the first of many unpleasant notes I made. Upon entry, I was struck by how the structure, built presumably as changing rooms has remained uncompleted for more than a decade.

It has been abandoned. Players of Storm Academy and Kotoko wore their jerseys and boots inside their buses. What was more disgusting was seeing the referees dressing up openly on the pitch. The referees, apparently didn’t come with their own vehicles, and since they couldn’t dress up in the public transport that brought them or at their hotels and walk to the Park, they had no option other than dressing up on the pitch after their warm-up session. What a shame.

Why a so-called football nation will subject its footballers and referees to such an embarrassing sight saddened me. I won't talk much about the state of the pitch since I didn't get close to it but from a distance, I could tell it has many undulating spots but Nkawkaw being a forest zone, with fine rainfall patterns, the grass has grown well to cover some of the holes.

The abandoned changing rooms at the Park must however be revisited. Nkawkaw is too popular a town not to have decent changing rooms at its football venue. Referees or anybody preparing for a match at that venue must not come and dress up in the full glare of spectators.

Whoever's responsibility it’s to complete the building hosting the changing rooms must wake up to his task. Okwawu United play their matches there. Are they or the authority concerned waiting till they gain premiership promotion before they work on the structure? They shouldn’t and need not wait till that time.