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Can Nigerian football survive the present throes of crises it is embroiled in? Will there be light at the end of the tunnel once the whole crisis blows over, if indeed it will?

These are tough times for the beautiful game. From every side football in the country is buffeted by crisis.

In the last one week members of the football fraternity have been treated to the spectacle of the court annulling an election that should not have held in the first place as well as an appeal against that decision. More importantly, there have been witnesses to shocking revelations of how the former leadership of Nigeria’s football governing body, the Nigeria Football Federation under impeached president, Sani Lulu, allegedly played Father Christmas with the funds of the federation.

To squander public funds on family members, cronies and friends, as these men are alleged to have done, is very unfortunate. To think that all these purportedly took place at a time funds were desperately needed to develop the game gives serious cause for worry.

It is fitting that they have been made to face the law. They will have an opportunity to defend themselves and prove to Nigerians that these grievous charges are not true. For, if indeed they are true, then we must question the state of mind of individuals we entrust with public property. We will question what would drive individuals to connive and pass off repainted buses as new ones and pocket millions in taxpayers’ funds or even to lavish $259, 080 as allowances on 68 individuals not entitled to such allowances.

The whole saga raises fundamental issues, one of which is the need for checks on individuals who hold public office. I recall that years ago when former chairman of the Nigeria Football Association devised statutes for the association, Abdulmumini Alao one of Nigeria’s most brilliant and forthright journalists had warned that the statutes were a potential time bomb in that it conferred too much power on the chairman of the association. He advised that something be done to whittle down his powers so that in future no individual could hold the game to ransom. His plea was not heeded and the result is what we are seeing today.

The charges against Lulu, Amanze Uchegbulam, Taiwo Ogunjobi and Bolaji Ojo-Oba by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the ongoing battle in the courts over the August 26 elections into the executive committee of the NFF are results of the failure to heed that advice.

If the NFF congress had done the right thing at the time, Lulu would not have been presented with an opportunity to tinker with the statutes to the extent that he has; he would not have manipulated the system to prune the number of voting delegates at NFF executive committee elections to 44 from 101 in the hope that majority of those delegates 37 of them who happen to chairmen of the 37 state football associations and Abuja (who he is alleged to have bought over by sponsoring them to the World Cup in South Africa) would return him to power.

As it is, his plan backfired but we are left to pick the pieces. We are presented with a situation where erstwhile comrades have become sworn enemies because rather than pursue the growth of Nigerian football for which they congregated in Abuja in the first place, they pursued private agendas.

It would be foolhardy of us to think that sole responsibility for the rot in our game should rest squarely with Lulu and his associates now facing the law. In varying degrees we are all culpable – from board members who looked the other when Lulu drunk on power ran the federation like his private company; journalists who benefitting one way or the other from the federation glossed over glaring inconsistencies between the mandate given to the federation and their actual performance, and the Ministry of Sports which is statutorily empowered to supervise the NFF shirked its responsibility.

That said, we must find a way out of the present situation we have found ourselves in.

One way to begin is to take a critical look at legislation regulating sports in the country and determine whether they need revision or outright abrogation. The Decree 101 of 1992, which in 2004 transmuted into NFA Act of 2004 remains the document giving government control over the NFF or NFA as it rightly ought to be called given the fact that Lulu’s unilateral change of body’s name has not been backed up by law.

If the law must continue to be in existence, and it appears that the men who have run football in the last four years are not interested in its abrogation, then they must be willing to be bound by its provisions. It does not make sense to receive public funding under the law and then refuse to be accountable for such funds when the time comes.

Our football administrators have played a double game in this regard. They have tried to play Nigeria off against FIFA. They profess loyalty to government in order to induce it to finance their activities while at the same giving FIFA the impression that they are legally an independent entity in whose affairs the Nigerian government is meddling in. Clearly, this cannot continue to go on.