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The decision of the
Nigeria Premier League (NPL) to hand sponsorship rights of its premier
league to telecommunications company, MTN Nigeria, has set the stage
for conflict with Globacom, the former sponsors who bankrolled the
league for the last five years.

The League said MTN
was willing to provide N550 million as take-off money. It added that
the amount will increase by 10 per cent annually with the total after
four years amounting to N2.6 billion. Globacom on the otherhand offered
N2 billion for four years with a start off sum of N450 million.

Last Friday in Lagos, Mohammed Jameel, Chief Operating Officer (COO) of Globacom, described the action of the NPL as injustice.

“What they have
done amounts to injustice. The announcement of MTN as winner of the bid
was a big shock to us. It was a big blow. It was a surprise to us that
MTN were declared winner because we did not go into bidding with them.
It was Total Promotions that we knew were bidding against us. It was
only in the front of the press that we got to know that it was MTN that
had won. It is complete injustice. The entire process was done in a
wishy-washy way; there was no proper documentation at all,” Jameel said.

“NPL in a hurry”

Jameel said the bid
process was engineered to arrive at a particular outcome noting that
for an organisation to present a proper bid, it needs to know who it
was competing against.

“We asked the bid
committee whether Total Promotions was bidding on its own and whether
if it wins the bid, it could resell the right to another party but we
got no response,” he said.

Jameel disputed the
figure attributed to his organisation saying “On Wednesday when the
bids were formally opened, the bid committee said what we presented was
too low that we should improve on it. We asked for time to enable us
confer with management.”

He said officials
of his organisation were shocked when on Thursday after they had put
their new offer, which he said stood at three billion naira, the NPL
officials rather than hold discussions with them, went ahead and called
a press conference around 2:30 pm where they announced that MTN had won
the bid. He stated that what emerged from the action of the NPL
officials was that they were in a hurry to close the matter.

“We did not offer
N2 billion. Our final offer was N3 billion. We submitted the bid at
their office by ten minutes past four in the afternoon and it was duly
received and acknowledged by an official of the organisation. We do not
have any other bid with the NPL. I challenge the NPL to produce any
document where we offered two billion naira,” Jameel said.

The Globacom,
officer said the last has not been heard of the matter disclosing that
his organisation will petition the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF)
and the National Sports Commission (NSC) to get NPL to do the right
thing.

No wrongdoing

When confronted the
league with Jameel’s allegations, Shehu Gusau, the NPL official who
chaired the bid committee, said he and his colleagues had been above
board in their dealings.

“We gave both
parties equal opportunity and the party with the best bid won. We did
not set out to favour one party to the detriment of the other.” On
Glo’s N3 billion bid, he said it was received well after the entire
process had ended.

“We received that
bid nearly two hours after the announcement had been made. They took
the bid to our office and the official they met called me to inform me
about it. I asked him to receive it and record the time it was
submitted. If you look at the time on the document, it says we received
it at 4:10 pm, which was after we had announced a winner.” He
explained. As both parties trade blames, the NFF has come out to
describe the bid exercise as less than satisfactory. At the weekend,
Demola Olajire, its head of media, described the decision to award
sponsorship rights to MTN as “unacceptable”, expressing displeasure
that the NPL did not carry it along during the exercise.

The NFF wondered
why the NPL, which is yet to sort out its leadership issues, should
enter into a long term relationship with a corporate organisation.