A ploy against the Nigeria Football Federation, trying to smear some senior officials of the federation, has been brought to our attention. While we know those behind this campaign, that is dead on arrival like several others before it, and ordinarily wouldn’t want to join issues with the characters behind it, we are compelled to provide a word of caution and to defend the name of our country before her international partners that have been craftily woven into this particular iteration of their scheme.
It must be said that FIFA tournaments are organized by FIFA in collaboration with host countries that have passed through its screening and selection process. It goes without saying that match tickets are the sole remit of FIFA while travel visas for fans and enthusiasts are issued at the behest of the host country. Participating countries and their official contingents go through the visa application processes of the host country to secure visas for players and officials.
For any person to suggest that the NFF either hoarded tickets, or denied intending visitors to the tournament ravel visas, to the recent FIFA Women’s World Cup, held in Australia and New Zealand, is a low even by the ridiculous low standards resorted to by these enemies of Nigeria and Nigerian football. It is important to note that the NFF is neither FIFA nor is it the Australian Foreign Affairs Ministry that issues match tickets and grants visas respectively, to have denied any person attendance of a showpiece for which the organizers would have wanted qualitative participants in the first place.
To want to drag the leadership of the NFF into such a matter is clearly an attempt to throw a proverbial stone into the market place, which would likely hit one’s own relative; to attempt to cast aspersions on the integrity of Nigerian football or its officials is to bring a sport that unites Nigerians at a time the country is in dire need of unity to confront common enemies in other spheres. The growth of football as a sport is synonymous with the continued corporate existence of Nigeria as a country as the round leather game holds enormous potential across politics, economic, social and other spheres of national life above the reach of ethnoreligious divisions that hold the country back.
What Nigerian football needs now is support and partnership to grow not baseless controversies that will make the sport less attractive to potential suitors. Nigerian football has the capacity to become a massive contributor to the Nigerian economy just as football contributes to the British economy as in other countries. The continued attacks on the leadership of Nigerian football by people who do not have any progressive ideas on how to move football forward, is costing the sport massively. The Civil Society Network for Good Governance would not stand idly by while some serial losers play politics with a passion of our people. Common sense prescribes that anybody who cannot win an election should work to become victorious in the next election, not try to pull the entire house down. We will not hesitate to name and shame those behind this clandestine plot against the future of Nigeria to further discredit them before Nigerians for good.
