Once
again, we find ourselves in a mess. We are becoming a people inured to
crises. It seems Nigerian football is fated to convulsions, which is
gradually draining it of its essence.
Last Monday, the
much anticipated ban from world football governing body, FIFA finally
came. For any serious observer of events since President Goodluck
Jonathan announced the withdrawal of Nigerian national teams from
international competition for two years and later rescinded the
decision, it was clear there was going to be a run-in with FIFA.
And this is not
because Nigeria is engaged in a serial infraction of global football
rules but simply because Sepp Blatter and his foot soldiers in Nigeria
have some designs on Nigerian football, which apparently, from the
manner they are going about the whole affair, is unseemly to say the
least.
As the title of
this piece suggests, Nigerians know that even though the ban clamped on
Nigeria last Monday came from FIFA’s headquarters in Zurich, the hands
that actually wrought the scheme, were Nigerian.
There are people in
this country feeding fat off the slender and fragile frame of Nigerian
football. They sense that with developments on the football scene in
the last few weeks, they are in danger of not only being unmasked but
that they are actually in danger of being made to pay for their sins
against the game in Nigeria.
These developments,
which have led to the arraignment of former football chiefs for their
financial recklessness, and a Federal High Court rightfully declaring
an election – that ought not have held in the first place – illegal,
have struck fear in them. They know that if the momentum is sustained,
it is finished for them; that their caper will come to an end.
And so, to remain
relevant they will do anything including making their country the
laughing stock of the international community. They will, like the
biblical Samson, pull down the entire structure of Nigerian football on
everyone including themselves if they cannot have their way.
Yet, these men
claim to love Nigerian football. They claim that they love their
country. How can someone love his country and repeatedly conspire
against it with power drunk foreign nationals? How can you love
football and then frustrate its growth at every turn?
These are questions I am sure even they will find very difficult to answer for the simple reason that it is not possible.
What we face at the
moment is something far more complex than people think. For me, the
present crisis goes beyond the nebulous FIFA concept of interference of
third parties in the affairs of a football federation. It goes beyond
the debate about whether Harrison Jalla of the National Association of
Nigerian Footballers should have gone to a Nigerian court or the Court
of Arbitration of Sports in Switzerland in order to force the
leadership of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), to do what is
fitting and proper.
The present
conflict is really about doing the right, that is, what is just and
equitable. We must always remind ourselves that no matter how modern or
sophisticated the human community has become, it should always be
guided in its conduct by the demands of justice. Without this, society
relapses into a Hobbesian state of anarchy. As many of us well know,
the present conflict in the Niger Delta for instance, is the product of
several decades of injustice suffered by the people of the area.
Government as sponsor of football
Speaking of
interference, can Blatter and his lieutenants in Switzerland seriously
claim not to be aware that in Nigeria, government is practically the
sole sponsor of football? Can they look us in the eye and say they are
ignorant of the fact that all the football clubs in the Nigerian
football league are bankrolled by the various state governments?
If they are not
aware, has their henchman in Nigeria, Amos Adamu not told them? Has
Adamu not let them know (if they want to claim ignorance) that in the
four years between the 2006 World Cup in Germany and this year’s
edition in South Africa, the Nigerian government has spent more than
two billion naira on the Super Eagles alone?
When the Eagles
were stranded in London just days to the World Cup after the NFF
leadership bungled a simple assignment of providing a befitting
aircraft to airlift the national team to South Africa,
did their
representative in Nigeria not tell them that it was the Nigerian
government that sent a plane from Nigeria to London to airlift the
squad to South Africa?
How can FIFA
seriously consider the Nigerian government a third party when it is
almost single-handedly bankrolling football in Nigeria? It beats my
imagination. Seriously does Blatter want us to know he is ignorant of
all these issues?
When the itinerant
FIFA President came to Nigeria last year and was hobnobbing with
Nigerian leaders did he not discover where the real locus of control of
Nigerian football lay? Of course not being blind and daft he would have
seen and understood these things. So, why does he persist in the folly
of threatening and then banning Nigeria for governmental interference
in Nigerian football? Does government, which spends tax payers’ funds
on football, not have a right to know how such money is spent?
What kind of
administrator is Blatter? Does he go through FIFA’s books or is he so
reckless as to spend without auditing the body’s accounts? Does he have
a responsibility to the sponsors who bankroll FIFA’s many activities
and does he consider them third parties when it comes to accounting for
every dollar he has received from them?
Really, Blatter
needs to get serious and find genuine ways of addressing the issue of
how member federations are funded. More importantly, he needs to take
serious interest in what the leadership of these federations do with
funds that are made available to them.
FIFA has a code of ethics, which it says should regulate the conduct of its members. The preamble to the code says:
“FIFA bears a special responsibility to safeguard the integrity and reputation of football worldwide.
FIFA is constantly
striving to protect the image of football, and especially that of FIFA,
from jeopardy or harm as a result of immoral or unethical methods and
practices. In this connection, the following Code has been passed.”
One of the articles
in the code says: Officials may not abuse their position as part of
their function in any way, especially to take advantage of their
function for private aims or gains.
Except Blatter has
been living on the moon, he cannot honestly tell us that he has not
been informed that Nigerian football is now like a defenceless lass
that is being raped repeatedly by lascivious men old enough to be her
father.
When Segun Odegbami wrote to FIFA, in June and later in August this
year, intimating the body of how Sani Lulu, NFF President at the time,
had manipulated the federation’s statutes for personal gain, did we
hear one word from FIFA? Again in August when a properly constituted
court ordered that there should be no elections until Jalla’s case had
been fully determined, did not the FIFA official sent to monitor the
election encourage Aminu Maigari and his cronies to flout the order?
