Protect your industry- GOC President to journalists

The President of the Ghana Olympics Committee, Ben Nunoo Mensah has appealed to journalists to protect the sports industry and also help brand the various sporting disciplines well in order to attract sponsorship.

According to the GOC president, some people are only interested in pushing agenda that will "only" court negative publicity for our Sports.

He expressed that when there is money in sports, the first beneficiaries would be the athletes, and the second beneficiaries would be the media, so the media should not join those destroying the industry that feed them.

Addressing the media on Wednesday May, 19 at Media Center at Accra Sports stadium, he said, "What my GOC administration has been trying to do is take the burden of funding off from the Ministry for Youth and Sports and try and find our own sponsorships from the corporate world before coming back to the ministry and seek for additional help to better our course.”

“My second remark is on the way we brand our sports in the country. Colleagues, there are two problems in our sports today. One is lack of funding and the other is the negative branding of sports. If we are able to work on the second, it automatically affects the first. Our sports cannot develop when we overly rely on the president and the ministry, we need support from the private sector, and it includes the companies here today. We can only get sponsorships if these brands hear good things about our sports”.

“No brand will be glad to be associated with negativity. It is always the case that they would want to hear good things about the venture they are investing in. There are 95% good things happening in sports, so why focus on the negativity? We need the good publicity to help us promote the brand of our sports in order to attract sponsors to make the sports lucrative.”