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With two days to
the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) elections initially scheduled for
yesterday, it looked like the men in the executive committee of the
football body were bigger than the rest of the country.

Against the
dictates of sound judgment, fair play and due process, they were bent
on going ahead with the elections, which had been programmed by deposed
president, Sani Lulu, to produce a particular outcome.

Entreaties from
their cronies that they back down; subtle threats from the sports
ministry, which could not openly bare its fangs after being stared down
by FIFA during President Goodluck Jonathan’s ban on the national teams;
ruling by two courts ordering stay of action on the polls; and protest
from some candidates in the elections that there were booby traps in
the process, appeared to have failed to elicit a change of heart from
Maigari and his team.

Indeed, on Thursday
in Abuja, Abdukareem Mustapha, chairman of the electoral committee,
echoing the voices of his masters in the executive committee told a
reporter that there was no going back on the elections.

“There is no
stopping the elections. It is only the congress that can decide to
change the date. As long as such instruction has not been given, there
is no reason to postpone the exercise,” he said.

Yet that same
Thursday, Maigari and his team capitulated to commonsense. After a
nocturnal parley in Abuja, the committee finally saw the futility in
stubbornly insisting on going ahead with an election everyone knew had
been rigged in advance by Lulu’s mindless tinkering with the statutes.

The congress of the
body was scheduled to meet yesterday to decide on the next line of
action. That meeting had not taken place at the time this piece was
written.

For me as a
journalist and football fan, I have been hugely disappointed by
developments in the last two weeks regarding the election. I have been
upset by the chicanery of the NFF officials who have damned public
opinion when it did not mesh with their inordinate ambition of
remaining in office to continue throttling Nigerian football.

I have been
saddened by the attitude of some of my colleagues who refused to do
what was right by putting pressure on the self-seeking cabal making us
the laughing stock of the international community by their knavery.

Most importantly,
my anger has been intense towards world football governing body, FIFA,
whose silence on this very important matter suggests complicity in the
ruining of Nigerian football by a few individuals.

For a body, which
preaches fair play, its silence has been baffling. That FIFA could
remain silent on such a serious issue after two very lucid and straight
forward letters sent to it by Segun Odegbami, one of the contestants
for the NFF presidency on the distortion of NFF statutes by Lulu, just
goes to prove like some of us have insisted in the past that Sepp
Blatter and his team in Zurich do not care much for the development of
Nigerian football.

Is it not
surprising that while FIFA failed to react to Odegbami’s letter and
others sent to it by concerned members of the football family, it did
not waste time in ordering the NFF to sort out issues arising from the
election of Davidson Owumi as chairman of the Nigeria Premier League.
FIFA’s action can be likened to that of a man who with his family
trapped in a midnight inferno in their apartment, will first move to
remove electronic gadgets in the living room.

Stopping State FA chairmen

Events of the last
few weeks have shown in the starkest way possible that there is serious
crisis in Nigerian football. This should be clear to even a casual
observer of events that have unfolded since the World Cup ended in
South Africa last month.

The first sign that
things were worsening came with the NFF congress of July 9 where
delegates were expected to take a hard look at the statutes
cannibalised by Lulu and do the sensible thing by correcting them.
Instead, they blandly endorsed the document without even as much as
perusing it.

My initial response
was shock and disappointment but after having had time to reflect on
the whole issue, I have since found out that it could not have been any
other way. And the reason is simply that the men who hold sway as
chairmen of the state football associations are too much a part of the
rot to be concerned about change. The State FA Chairmen lack the moral
capital to spearhead a revolution in Nigeria football.

Asking them to do so will be like asking a grave digger to shovel sand from the spot upon which he is standing.

This revelation has
naturally led me to conclude that unless these men are removed from the
picture there is no way a truly independent candidate can emerge to
lead the NFF. The challenge before Odegbami, Lumumba Adeh and the other
contestants therefore, is to devise means of ensuring that if elections
into the state FAs eventually hold that these men are eased out of
power.

I will wager here that if these FA chairmen stand for elections and win then the status quo will be maintained.