I AM thinking.
Despite all of Nigeria’s huge potential in sports, success has been served the people only in occasional small doses. The ongoing World Athletics in Tokyo is a good example with the sprinkling of brilliant performances by a handful of gifted athletes. It could easily have been a ‘flood’ if the country had the right systems, structures and administrators in place. The most important are the administrators – the human minds and capital.
The process of elections for administrators into the boards of National Sports Federations will soon hold. Unfortunately, the exercise shall be another rigmarole. A currently well-entrenched process that has failed and will continue fail, unless something happens to change the situation that appears to be a ‘mission impossible’ for now.
The present system will throw up the same administrators from the failed system, still limited in capacity and unable to guide the country’s sports development and administration through the maze of past failures to new grounds and to attain global heights.
The country, in its shortsightedness, was misled many years ago to discard an old, simple, functional but imperfect process of electing the right leaders for sports federations. Instead the country adopted a new process that presented the ‘Second-Eleven’ from the stock of Nigeria’s sports administrators.
That derailment happened almost 20 years ago in Makurdi during the elections for the leadership of the Nigerian Football Association, NFA. It would take writing a whole book of uncommon drama and political intrigues to capture all that transpired during that entire period leading to ‘Makurdi 2006’ in Nigeria’s football story. A movie will be more apt. It will be a blockbuster!
The idea for it keeps dancing around in my head. Nigerians will never believe the level of morass, the ugliness of it all, the shenanigans, the immorality and the brazen manipulations that took place in order to stop Ibrahim Galadima from wresting the control of football from Government under the watch of Amos Adamu.
Probably, only through such a graphic display as a movie can Nigerians start to understand the enormity of the matter and its genesis, and appreciate the depth of the hole into which the country’s sport has sunk for almost 20 years on the back of the pursuit of personal goals by some actors in the sports field.
For Adamu to succeed in his plans to stop Galadima during the election in Makurdi, it required deploying the power of the federal government to amend the existing constitution to expand, amongst a few other strategic articles, the electoral field from the manageable few persons that constituted the electorate in the previous constitution, to a new electorate of numbers beyond the reach and control of Galadima’s counter scheme.
The bloated addition to the electoral field check-mated Galadima. The elections were taken away from Kano, Galadima’s base. That ‘killed’ it.
Although, the mission was ‘successful’, it also birthed a by-product, a monstrous new constituency in the firmament that has sustained and now engulfs the entire superstructure of the Nigeria Football Association like an octopus, and has become the new engine of administration in the NFA till now.
Disregarding the consequences of their actions then, the puppeteers in the sports ministry adopted that flawed process as a model, extending its application to other sports federations, and spreading the cancerous prescription.
Since then, elections have become a tug of war, throwing up and harvesting mostly ‘second-eleven’ administrators with plenty of passion and ambition, but short on experience, vision and the humility to acknowledge their limitations and embrace even good-intentioned external contributions.
Every criticism or new proposition is considered a threat to survival for those enjoying the fallout of that misguided process of intervention by government in Makurdi.
The Sports Ministry, under Amos Adamu, the most powerful civil servant in charge of sports in the annals of Nigerian sports, sacrificed the legacy it inherited that had lasted more than three decades, in order to get rid of Ibrahim Galadima whose main goal was to wrest the levers of football administration from the control of government, and to entrench independence for the NFA in accordance to the articles of its membership in FIFA.
Although, a noble mission, Galadima was also a product and beneficiary of Government’s nomination for his first term in office. The full story of Ibrahim Galadima’s tenure as Chairman of the Nigerian Football Federation (NFA) and his struggle to fight against his ‘removal’ by the same government that appointed him must be retold one day in order for everyone to understand how Nigerian football and other sports administrations are in the present chaotic and crisis-ridden mess that has lasted for two decades.
Amos Adamu’s story, his role and impact after he joined the Sports ministry and became the most powerful man in the history of Nigerian sports, must also be told for posterity and for better understanding of the enormity of his battle with Galadima. No one fought Adamu and won till he left the civil service.
His influence on Nigerian sport, now well embedded in the super structure, continues to linger and fester to this day. The issue was that Galadima became Chairman with Adamu’s support. The sports ministry did not want him back as Chairman at the end of his tenure that was considered a ‘failure’ because the Super Eagles failed to qualify for the World Cup, and no Chairman survived the unpardonable ‘crime’ of not qualifying the country for the World Cup.
Galadima had started a series of reforms that he wanted to complete, particularly securing ‘independent status’ for the NFA as contained in the first article of the private organisation’s constitution. He wanted to be returned as Chairman without government support.
The ensuing fight was rofo rofo. Sports development became the ultimate victim. The ‘winner’ had to distort, deform, manipulate, and convolute the system. The genie was let out of the bottle and could no longer be put back.
‘Second-division’ administrators, not from the best stock in the country, took over power and would not surrender it again without bringing down the entire super structure. They anchored their achievement to the articles of the most powerful organisation in world football, FIFA, an organization that will always back its own against any form of government interference.
That’s the unfortunate price Nigerian football has had to pay, the inability to return its administration to a state of normalcy and correctness despite the evidence all around that things are not well with Nigerian football administration and with sports as a whole in the country.
The NFA election in Makurdi opened Pandora’s box and established a ‘poisoned’ precedent. It created a new constitution that created a new constituency, a bloated group whose status as a member of the NFA is shrouded in the ignorance of their correct status and role in the architecture of football in a unique Nigerian political set-up that confuses even FIFA.
Federations terminated the simple, straightforward, inexpensive, equitable process of electing their leadership in boards, and adopted a long, convoluted, manipulative, expensive, corruption-laden process that perpetuates crisis that comes with every election into the boards of every federation since ‘Makurdi 2006’.
Fixing the matter does not require a degree in rocket science. It requires good old common sense, an objective analysis of the peculiar nature of Nigeria’s geo-political setup and how it can be fitted into the framework of a constitution created solely for the good of sport and its development in the country.
The present federations’ constitutions feed and provide a feast for individuals that don’t deserve it. In doing so, they also impoverish sport itself and all those principal actors that deserve a place in the system.
The solution is simple, almost too good to be true with the starting point being for the National Sports Commission, NSC, to be properly constituted and reinforced with a board of authentic stakeholders in accordance to the law establishing it. This will provide a more solid platform for the articulation and discourse on the subject of proper reforms for general sports development.
