By Daily Sports on January 9, 2017

This is 2017 and I will like to start this week by saying, my greatest asset since the coming of Daily Sports is the readers of this column every Monday and beyond. I’m so proud of you all. You always made my day, each time I look at how overwhelmingly you have supported being our ardent readers. More grease to your elbows!

You have been very awesome, making us to be counted among the ones that matter in the new media family. Our readership base generally kept increasing not only this column which has witnessed tremendous patronage of late. Daily Sports has shown maturity, reliability, authoritative and exclusive in the way and manner we judge news, handling, collection, collation and dissemination in all facets of reportage and analysis of sporting activities. We have washed our hands extremely neat hence we are (just one year on) already among the front liners. The dynamism and your urge have kept our faith firmly rooted in the project.

I say Thank You for being there.

The year just began, and we will as usual mirror deep down highlighting all areas Nigerians ought to know how sports are being administered. That brings me to this: NFF is news any day. Our last copy on their activities last week sold out resoundingly. Before this page went to bed Sunday, over 22,000 thousand hit traffic are recorded.

Now, NFF not just done again blundered. Last week Thursday; it inaugurated Nigeria Women Football League (NWFL) Board without conducting a pending election. Aisha Falode aka Mama Sports is Independent Chairperson and others. Let me be honest with you, I don’t have any grudge against her and couples of others so appointed.  As a matter of fact Mama Sports has deep passion and interest in sports generally and capable of any office which she will also administer with transparency and best standard practices. However, my take is how NFF Chairman, Amaju Pinnick strong headed against popular wish forcefully planted her there. She is a good material any day but she ought to go into office through election which is the only acceptable means. Therefore, the only appointment that holds water is Nkechi Obi’s as the CEO of the body. She has all it takes to man such position even higher ones. Without any prejudice, she has paid her dues. In short, she is a round peg in a round hole. She is coming from the private sector. She is a self-made African woman, the records are glaringly there. I won’t fail to say that the others are illegally there courtesy of the powers that are hell bent in trading off women football on the platter of man-know-man basis.

Let it be clear that I don’t have any iota of respect for anybody that disobeys democratic process. Amaju Pinnick is one. He is heady. Where he got the title of Independent Chairman and so on remains his bad market. So far, I know it is not in any football statute. It is his creation. FIFA abhors these illegalities Amaju Pinnick and his cohorts have been inflicting on our football. What he again perpetrated the other day was in all ramifications the appointment of sole administrator for NWFL in place of organising election, such an action is uncalled for. I have written severally on NFF’s deliberate design to wrestle Women Football to the ground and queried why elections into its Board are yet to be held. Sadly, what came up instead was the above. He unilaterally compensated his girls and boys. His regime’s no agenda for the upliftment of the game rather than killing it off is not hidden. Hope Sports Minister, Solomon Dalung is reading. This is part of whatsoever is 2017, though; I may give it a full treatment subsequently.

There are so many sour renditions from NFF leadership to football since its inception. For instance, Super Eagles are not in Gabon 2017 AFCON biannual premier football summit. The Flying Eagles will not be in Africa Youth Championship, a qualifying platform for World U-20 Championship to be held later in the year, also the U-17 Eaglets failed to qualify to defend the World Cup it won in Chile. It is the dilemma of our football, still counting... It has never been such a harvest of woes for Nigeria.

The only hope for now on a major football competition is the ongoing Russia 2018 World Cup qualifiers. Though, Eagles are currently on top of their group and one prays the fairly high performance it posted before the long break sticks firmly and continues unabated to enable the team grab the ultimate group sole ticket.

Such a feat will no doubt change the narratives for the game in 2017 and probably propel it to set the tone for greater things to come.

Without much ado, sports generally ought to be on fast track and agent for positive not recession infested change in our youths and young ones who are naturally talented majority eager to earn their living through sports. Unfortunately, lack of provision of infrastructures by governments at all levels have denied our youths such begging opportunities.

In other very cautious, responsive and civilised climes that used sports to excel and drew the world’s attention and destination to their various countries and also involved the private sector in the whole planning, funds provision and execution of their programmes saw them excel.    

It has been lack of it from Nigerian administrators who desperately struggle to be in offices for more of what will come into their pockets than the development of the Nigerian child with passion and interest for sports through the process. Every genuine plan towards achieving and investing in our youths hit the rock and scattered when sports development was introduced to replace the well laid out and researched plan of developing the child through sports.

It created avenue for all kinds of sharp practices that climaxed the current cheating, making athletes and their coaches live in abject poverty. We can go on and on to unveil the sorry sight that is our sports.

Some myopic administrators would readily tell you that it was negative media write ups and reportage on sports that scare investors to put in their money into the sector.

However, none of them will ever tell you that their lack of accountability and other transparent best practices remain the bane why the private sector developed cold feet putting their funds in sports. Truth is that administrators of sports in the country have come to see transparency in spending money placed in their care as an aberration, but they would continue to beat about the bush covering up their inglorious bad tracks. It is their way of defence passing of bulks, but if you see how they fiddle public fund entrusted in their care you will instantly lose appetite. 

Simply put, sports administration and high performance by athletes nose-dived drastically in the 1990’s when God fearing administrators were rigged out of that year’s election into sports federations shortly after the unholy entry of a certain evil genius into the top bracket of our sports administration which finally brought all these malaise upon sports in the country. Before his mischievous adventure which introduced unprecedented corruption and pains of today in sports, sports was corruption and other sharp dealing free.

Head or tail, we pray Nigeria would realise her full potentials this year in sports by marching concrete and becoming athletes’ friendly and with sound programmes. The need to imbibe proactive and be on top of issues without it badly affecting the growth of their various sports and welfare of athletes should remain key too.

The administrators should try as much as possible to come out cleaner, institute internationally acceptable internal mechanisms which would instant track down corrupt practices by them, secretaries of sporting federations and other officials which ravages every federation presently if the much talked about huge private sector investment funds must find its way into the sports to fasten development and sundry. Whatsoever sports would achieve in 2017 will depend solely if there will be honest and drastic attitudinal change from the administrators and their partners in crime against the nation’s sports, men and women.

It is endemic and the anti- corruption noise never direct its searchlight on this sector the government has pumped in trillions without results in either human capital development or development of infrastructures moneys kept going straight into private pockets.

We will kept talking and writing despite their deaf and dumb deliberate policy. Ours is to report and analyse as it is bringing all sides to the table. We will continue to be part and parcel of truth pursuing determined what is front of us; the ones at our back would as usual be taken care of by God. The bottom-line is, Nigerian sports are sick. There are so many clowns masquerading as genius. You will not be wrong if you call them chronic pretenders of the first order. Nigerian sports are dire need of messiahs that would bail it out of this endless mess. Welcome, 2017 the year to be or not to be for the nation’s sports. Discussion continues. Keep shooting hard, till next week!!

Source Daily Sports

Posted January 9, 2017

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