‘I’ve seen hell’: the allegations rocking women’s football in Sierra Leone

F or Bilkisu Kandeh-Turay, representing her country should have been the pinnacle of her career. Yet, despite the arrival of Isha Johansen as the first female president of the Sierra Leone Football Association in 2013, it had turned into a nightmare. “We didn’t get kits, proper food, medical facilities, transport … nothing,” Kandeh-Turay says. “I started raising these concerns and spoke with some FA officials. They said they were planning to do something, but they didn’t.”

The talented striker, who went on to captain the under-20s team, was 17 in 2017 when she complained to the senior women’s team coach, Abdulai Bah, about the poor conditions. Kandeh-Turay alleges that he responded by sending her pictures of his penis and pornographic videos, as well as “asking me for sex every day” over the next few months.

“I started talking about it to my friends and we decided to go and tell Isha,” she says of a conversation she alleges took place with Johansen in 2018. “I told her about some of the things we were having to deal with and, without naming names, told her that one of the coaches had been asking us for sex and it was intimidating. She said: ‘OK, we’re going to fix that.’ But whenever I tried to reach her after that I never got any response. I have been trying to raise these issues a long time ago when she was there. Isha knows me by name.”

Bah was suspended by the SLFA in October 2021 when Kandeh-Turay repeated her accusations against him in a radio interview – six months after Johansen took up a seat on the Fifa council and was replaced as SLFA president by Thomas Daddy Brima. Fifa’s ethics committee is investigating after criticism of the SLFA’s handling of Bah’s case by the international players’ union, Fifpro.