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How long will these go on? For how long will greed and selfishness continue to throttle Nigerian football?

It is really
distressing that while other societies are marching forward and
dragging their football along with it, here in Nigeria we are setting
back the game by decades.

The English Premier
League, which we are all accustomed to watching and other leagues like
the La Liga in Spain and the Bundesliga in Germany are already in full
swing with players, fans and officials lapping up all the action.

In our case, the
league is held captive by greed, selfishness and ego. The unfolding
drama over who sponsors the league has in very eloquent language
presented our sports administrators and some players in our business
sector as enemies of the game.

The whole saga
certainly re-enforces the argument for football to be run and driven by
individuals without any attachment to the government. It is
government’s involvement in the game through its funding of it that has
created room for the kind of malfeasance we are now seeing.

For if truth be
told if the Nigeria Premier League board is not controlled by the
Nigeria Football Federation, which in turned is controlled by the
National Sports commission, which is itself controlled by the
Presidency, we would not have the kind of situation where the congress
of the NPL, which ratified a bid process undertaken by a committee set
up for that purpose would turn around to annul it stating that all
parties were not carried along. We would also be spared the situation
where the National Sports Commission (NSC), which set up a panel to
review the bid process (even though it was none of their business) and
found the process flawless, would turn around to exert pressure on the
NPL to cancel the bid.

Why do we have
small men in and around Nigerian football? How come we have difficulty
doing simple things; accomplishing simple tasks? Is Nigerian football
fated to be yoked eternally to these greedy, egotistic and selfish
individuals in a dance of death?

Moral burden

The tragedy of the
present situation is that of all the parties involved, none is without
one moral burden or the other. The shenanigans of the officials at the
NSC and NFF are well known to us, so we will not dwell on them here.
That leaves us with Globacom and Total Promotions, the party aggrieved
by the latest faux pas by the NPL.

Let me state at this point that Globacom has done well to have funded the Nigerian league these many years.

Their intervention
proved crucial along the way. That said it is also important to point
out that they have benefited immensely from their relationship with the
NPL. While it cannot be said that organisers of our league had done a
good job of packaging it, Globacom did benefit from brand visibility.

It is thus
uncharitable for them to claim as they have done that the reason they
failed to fulfil their contractual obligations to the NPL with regard
to the nearly one billion being owed the league body is because of
corruption within the NPL. Does Globacom have any proof that this is
the case (at any rate the High Court sitting in Lagos, which ordered it
to pay the money to the NPL didn’t think so)? And is there a clause in
the contract, which states that it could withhold funds if it suspected
that it wasn’t being put to proper use?

If Globacom feels
so strongly that the NPL mismanaged sponsorship funds, why is it still
interested in sponsoring the league? Would it willingly commit more
funds to the same body to mismanage? I suspect that Globacom has not
told us the real reason they withheld the N922 million being the last
instalment of its sponsorship agreement.

As for Total
Promotions, only MTN knows why it opted to use the company as agent in
its bid to acquire sponsorship rights to the Nigerian league. It is
understandable that having been bruised before it is not willing to
have its ego dented any further and thus prefers to bid by proxy but
the question is: why Total Promotions, an organisation already
affiliated to the NPL and one, which has thus far failed to
satisfactorily explain how funds for broadcast rights for the league
have been expended?

It is regrettable that the league has found itself wedged between parties whose conduct has been less than satisfactory.

As they engage themselves in mortal combat, it is the game that suffers.