Heading to the Civil Court to help Nigerian football!

One of the great shocks in world football this past week is Italy’s failure to qualify for the FIFA World Cup….for the third time in a row!!


For Italy, it is a monumental DISASTER. The country’s Minister of Sports publicly called for the resignation of the President of the country’s football federation.

The President resigned accordingly! It is the honourable thing to do!


The interpretation is simple: even the government of advanced football cultures ‘interfere’ in football matters without attracting any FIFA sanctions.


This sounds like music coming out of Nigeria. The country has also failed painfully to qualify for two consecutive World Cups.


Going forward, the blind-fold should now be taken from the eyes of Nigerians.


Already, the Chairman of the National Sports Commission (Nigeria’s Minister of Sports) did not call for anybody’s resignation despite the shame, but has created a soft landing for the NFF with the offer of a well-trodden harmless path: he ‘advised’ the NFF to carry out some reforms and to amend offensive and retrogressive articles in their current constitution before conducting the next elections that are coming up later in the year.


I hear some reforms have been immediately carried out, even though they are not far-reaching enough and are disguised to still produce the same old results.


It is important to recall that when the last President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, late President Muhammadu Buhari, advised the NFF board to amend the constitution some three years ago, the board simply disregarded the directive, conducted their elections, and damned the consequence. They have remained in office till now basking in the failure of Nigerian football governance and the stalling of the game’s growth at many domestic levels.


It is against this background that I am nursing the plan to go to the Nigerian Civil Courts, to temporarily halt the planned elections into the Executive Committee of the Nigeria Football Federation, NFF, and have the courts examine the laws, the rules and regulations and the pending court cases around Nigerian football, taking into cognizance the history, documents, and the complaints by aggrieved stakeholders on the processes being proposed to be used to elect the new board of the NFF.


The constitution of any national federation is not cast in stone. Every country sets up their own processes in accordance to their laws, their constitution, geography, political arrangements, and culture.

The important thing is that whatever constitution they come up with must not offend the fundamental principles (mostly technical) of running and organising the game, globally.


So, the NFF must operate with a constitution that represents Nigeria’s best interests and laws without contravening FIFA or CAF laws.


Very simply, my intention is to challenge the present constitution, show its inequity, how it deviates from historic antecedents and well-established traditions, the current illegalities, the unfairness, unreasonable funding, and how a faulty system has been ignorantly normalized in the mid-1990s and have now run Nigeria football development aground.


I have no axe to grind with any individual members of the current board. Many of them are my friends. They all have good intentions for Nigerian football. Unfortunately, some narrow interests as well as ignorance of the past becloud the genesis, the history and original vision and spirit of the Nigeria Football Association that promoted development that should have been sustained. These were truncated when a sole Administrator, without a proper grounding in Nigeria’s football history, took over the rein of Nigeria’s football and introduced measures to take care of some unwanted particular developments in the system. After succeeding in his mission, he then allowed that process to become the norm.


With a high turnover of administrators at the highest levels and the lure of the money now present in the arrangement, that system cannot revert back to the correct past, the adopted ‘error’ has sustained and became the new norm, and has halted Nigeria’s football growth since then.


That system harbors a faulty electoral system that has worsened with time and has been perfected for manipulation whenever needed. The elections are now public, outrageously more expensive, more political, more convoluted, more offensive to Nigerian laws and interests, and are holding back genuine development.


The present football structure from the elections now harbors illegalities and promotes practices that are annoying to disenfranchised members, and retrogressive in their impact.


What have been concocted as electoral process, so far, do not tick all the essential boxes, do not include all constituencies and members, do not justify the unequal, lopsided representation of constituencies at the congress, fuel the disguised political influence through venue-selection, as well as the eligibility conditions that favour particular contestants.


My intention is to pass the articles in the constitution through the test-tube of the Nigerian laws, plus the socio-cultural, political and geographic interests of the country. All of these whilst ensuring that the rules and regulations of FIFA are not offended.


After 3 decades of observing this anomaly in Nigerian football, I believe, the impasse can only be settled either at the National Assembly, or in the civil courts. Since I am not a member of the National Assembly, and I don’t know a member that understands the complexities well enough to champion the cause, the only option left is to seek interpretation and justice in the Nigerian Civil Courts.


That’s why I am heading there if the system does not respect the directive of the National Sports Commission for complete reforms (not a part of it for starters as is being suggested now by some people).


It is better to resolve it fully, once and for all, or to stop the process until it is done. What should not happen is to conduct these next elections under the same old regulations and constitution that will produce the same old results that have not helped Nigerian football to grow and develop in three decades.


What Nigeria needs now is a simple governance structure (Executive Committee), elected by only relevant, registered members of the NFF on an equal representation basis, through an easy, simple, inexpensive, open process. The election must be held in the Headquarters of the Federation in the Federal Capital City to eliminate external influence and reduce tendency for corrupt practices. This new process must produce a lean board of quality leadership and members that can take Nigerian football to the highest levels in the world in the next few years.