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I had wanted to
talk about the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) elections this week,
given developments in the last one week. I had to shelve it when I read
comments coming from Amos Adamu during the ‘Stakeholders Forum’, which
was held in Abuja last week.

In the comments
credited to him in some national dailies, he was laying the blame of
the rot in Nigerian sports on the influx of non-professionals into the
administration of sports particularly football.

Adamu said among other things that:

“In Nigeria today,
non-professionals have taken over the administration of football,
taking decisions without moving ahead. How do we explain that a
Nigerian coach who qualified the nation for the World Cup was sacked,
while a white man, who did not win a single match, was being praised?

“If we must excel in competitions, we must go back to the drawing board by doing the right thing.

Not until
professionals are put in charge of administration of football, the
problem besieging football in the country would persist. If we must
move ahead, we must place round pegs in round holes.”

He added:

“Nobody can
intimidate me out of sports; it is what I know how to do. Let me also
say that it here that I will take responsibility for my actions and
those of my workers, but the truth is that most of the people talking
have no stake and they don’t know what they are talking about. So, you
can only sympathise with them because they don’t know”.

He went on to take a swipe at sports journalists for promoting mediocrity in the reporting of sports.

Coming from another
individual, it would have made some sense but from someone who occupied
some of the most important positions in Nigerian sports and failed to
contribute to its development, it is downright insulting to Nigerians.

It is interesting
that Adamu says non-professionals have been running football in Nigeria
and have thus been responsible for running it aground. It would have
helped for him to have been specific by mentioning names since he says
he cannot be intimidated by anybody.

Since he has not we
can only assume that he is merely punching air. But to engage him all
the same, let’s cast our minds back to the last election held into the
board of the NFF in 2006; the election that produced the board whose
tenure just ended. Can Amos Adamu tell Nigerians how Sani Lulu got to
become Chairman and later president of the federation or is he claiming
ignorance? Can he come clean and let everyone know how Amanze
Uchegbulam and his shadowy ‘Stakeholders’ were instigated into to
hounding Ibrahim Galadima the then NFA boss out of office?

Nigerians would
like to know the role he played in getting Urs Linsi, then FIFA
Secretary General to supervise the removal of Galadima, who by the way
was championing autonomy of the football federation, a cause he, Adamu
pretends to support.

If his memory is short, that of a good many Nigerians are not.

Even moving from
football, let’s look at Adamu’s accomplishments in office as Director
of Sports Development. If you add up the total number of years he spent
in that office plus the time he spent as Director General of the
National Sports Commission (NSC), we are looking at nothing less than
ten years.

Now, in the scheme
of things that office happens to be the brain box of the sports
establishment in Nigeria. It is there that strategies for developing
sports from the grassroots through the whole gamut of designing
programmes for elite athletes, the national institute of sports and
other ancillary agencies should emanate.

No useful ideas

What was Adamu’s score card before he was kicked out of the sports commission by late President Yar’Adua?

Is Nigerian sports better off because he occupied the strategic office of sports development director? Is it worse off?

The answer is
obvious – Nigeria has gone ten years without an Olympic gold medal; we
have gone eleven years without a single medal at the athletics world
championships; we have repeatedly come up short in a number of
continental and international competitions like the All Africa Games
and the Commonwealth Games.

Again, because
Adamu failed in his job of designing a blueprint for the development of
Nigerian sports, we have become very comfortable with cheating. Without
a tinge of conscience we field thirty-year-olds in competitions meant
for children under 17 years of age.

Today, Nigerian
sports is tottering. We have failed to take advantage of both our
numerical strength and prodigious amount of talent. Adamu failed to
provide the needed direction while he occupied important offices in
Nigeria’s sports establishment.

While Nigerian
sports founders, Adamu’s career has blossomed. At the moment he
occupies important positions in world football. As Chinua Achebe
reminds us in his epic, Things Fall Apart, those whose palm kernel has
been cracked for them by benevolent spirits should not forget to be
humble.

Amos Adamu has come this far because Nigerian sports provided him
the platform, he should think of ways genuine ways of showing gratitude
instead of dismissing critics of his non-performance in office as
ignorant.