June 9 – Sierra Leone finally has a new football federation chief after Thomas Daddy Brima (pictured) was the surprise choice to succeed Isha Johansen who has relinquished power after eight years in charge.
The 46-year-old defeated Sadick Deen-Nyarkoh by 31 votes to 26 after Johansen withdrew from the presidential race in order to concentrate on her FIFA Council position.
“My immediate plan is reconciliation,” Brima told BBC Sport Africa. “It’s an open secret that there have always been problems in Sierra Leone football.
“At this point we are going to call a retreat we’ll get everybody that has been frustrated one way or the other to come and vent out their grievances and we try to pilot the right way forward.”
Brima’s only administrative experience has been as chairman of a second tier club, Wilberforce Strikers. But after his short playing career he moved to the United States and earned degrees in business and politics.
He was one of five initial candidates but was boosted by the withdrawal of three of them including Johansen, who then gave him her backing. The two other withdrawals, Emmanuel Saffa Abdulai and Rodney Michael, both backed the defeated Deen-Nyarkoh.
The son of a former government minister, Brima added: “It’s been a long time coming. My strategy was in place with and I knew that I was going to be a force to reckon with. I knew I was going to win as early as 14 months back because I told a lot of people that I was going to be the next SLFA president.”
Michael’s decision to pull out came in spite of a ruling 24 hours earlier from the Court of Arbitration for Sport which overturned the SLFA ethics committee’s decision to disqualify him from the contest. His shock withdrawal was reported locally to have been the result of a mandate from the country’s president Julius Maada Bio.
Johansen, Africa’s first elected female FA president, had been at the helm of the SLFA since 2013. But her tenure was characterised by conflict.
She had been accused of deliberately delaying the congress by repeatedly postponing it to avoid an election
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