Category: Ade Ojeikere

Are we a cursed nation? I don’t think so, even though some charlatans portray us as such with their devious acts. Some of us have this penchant for seeing every avenue as a money spinner. We hide under the cloak of being business-minded people, especially when we are in vantage positions.

We bend the rules to suit ourselves, not minding how this affects other parties. We are blinded by greed, which prevents us from looking at things objectively. This attitude won’t stop because the guilty ones always get a slap on the wrist.

The first enemies of our football are the two Golden Eaglets’ coaches who ‘kidnapped’ Kelechi Iheanacho from his parents for three days. It took Iheanacho’s father’s outcry about his missing son before one of the shameless coaches linked the son with his father. What a country!

In truth, Iheanacho is a minor because of his football age as an Under-17 boy. It means that he has between three and four years to play in the junior cadre of big European clubs to be groomed for the bigger task ahead.

Such long-term project should involve Iheanacho’s parents and the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), not the coaches; except such coaches want to link the boy with their former clubs, in this case, the renowned Barcelona FC of Spain.

If the story is that one of the coaches was using his contacts to secure Iheanacho’s future through Barcelona, not a few Nigerians would have been pleased.

I’m sure that Iheanacho’s father would have loved such a move that might offer his son a big opportunity to play alongside Lionel Messi. He would also learn a lot at Barcelona.

Even then, Iheanacho’s parents ought to have been briefed about the move. Such uncivilised way of doing things is only informed by greed and the usual Shylock agreements that some of our coaches and clubs have with European scouts. This is why we couldn’t track the Under-17 kids that the late Yemi Tella used to win the trophy for Nigeria in 2007.

What this disgraceful conduct shows is that the coaches were only exploiting the route of short-changing Iheanacho. In other climes, the template for transfers is known. No coach can trade a player without discussing with the country’s FA chiefs. Such discussions will help the FA know where the player is being taken to. They also would ask key questions about the programmes in the place for him and the arrangement made for his welfare since he is an underage player. Need I add that the FA chiefs will want to ask the player’s parents if they are comfortable with the plans made for their son? Such attention to welfare issues will, undoubtedly, do a long way in ensuring that the boy has a life after playing the beautiful game.

What is clear about this needless mercantile morass is that the NFF don’t have a plan for the Eaglets. If there was any positive arrangement for the stars among them, it would not have been possible for the coaches and their Shylock agents to ‘kidnap’ Iheanacho. We do not know how far this rot has gone. We are privy to this one because Iheanacho’s father cried out. We won’t be shocked if no one knows the whereabouts of Isaac Success. Those fingered in this Iheanacho saga must never be allowed to have anything to do with the team. If they want to be agents, they should drop their coaching jobs and take the necessary examinations. They can’t be both coaches and agents.

It is sinful for agents to be coaches, for such coaches are unlikely to be fair in their selection of players. They will probably always pick their candidates first. Coaches who are agents of big clubs do so through proxies, of course, to avoid the flaks from botched deals and to keep their integrity intact.

Many sneered when the story broke that some of the disqualified Eaglets that featured in the Africa championship came from one of the coaches’ academy. No problems with players coming from the coach’s academy if he isn’t the owner. But where he is, the NFF ought to have investigated the matter and taken stern action. If they did, we won’t be struggling to get the coach off the back of the Ihenachos.

It is this impunity exhibited by most of coaches that has scuttled the process of getting age-grade players to graduate to the Super Eagles. This new set of Eaglets won’t be any different, given what we have on our hands.

It is instructive to note that Iheanacho won the MVP in UAE, just as Ronaldinho did in 1997 in the same competition in Egypt. Messi won it at the U-20 level in 2005 in Holland. Need I waste space to enumerate what Ronaldinho achieved and what Messi has achieved? It is about time a Nigerian followed this developmental path, and I feel strongly that Iheanacho could even become the World Footballer of the year someday. Did I hear you say “Amen, Amen”?

I still weep over the way we have buried the late Yemi Tella’s efforts with the 2007 Eaglets. Tella’s boys were U-17 World Cup champions, yet the majority of them have not graduated into the Super Eagles team for the 2014 World Cup in Brazil.

In 1999, Spain came with their U-20 side to Nigeria for the World Cup tournament hosted here with Casillas, Xavi and a few others. They lifted the trophy by beating Japan, under the tutelage of Phillipe Troussier, 2-0 in Lagos. Members of that youthful squad constitute the current World Cup and European Cup champions. We need to emulate this type of growth.

The lesson from the Iheanacho saga is for the NFF to immediately place a caveat emptor on all the Eaglets, warning clubs not to do transfer business with either the players or agents, except the NFF. The important aspect to this warning is that the players are underage and wouldn’t be ready for club football until after two to four years.

In addition, NFF must reorganise its international department- the body that deals with inter-club and intra-club transfers of Nigerian players. This department should be the NFF’s revenue base, if effectively managed.

Personnel in the international department should not constitute themselves into travel agents, visa racketeers and bureau de change operators. They should be knowledgeable people who at the touch of a button in their office will tell us the location of any Nigerian player who left for Europe, Asia, the Americas or the Diaspora.

Nigerian kids leave this country in droves, many sadly with forged documents, making it extremely difficult to track them. Of course, shockingly too, Nigerian kids who are taken away from their parents in their pursuit of bigger cash most times have several Nigerian passports. Remember the story of a boy known to everyone in the domestic league as John Akhimen, who became Richard Eromoigbe and played for the Eaglets with no one bothering to ask questions about the change of identity? I digress.

The NFF chiefs must interface with the parents of the current Eaglets’ squad in deciding their future. Together, all the parties must ensure that these talented lads don’t go the way of others before them. In doing so, these parties must encourage the brilliant ones to combine education with playing football. This arrangement guarantees their future, given that the life span of any athlete is short, barring injuries.

Aminu Maigari must put the machinery in place to identify the football academies, standardise their programmes by ensuring that the right personnel work in such academies before registering them and then monitor how their players grow in their professional careers.

The implication of this exercise is that the documents taken from these academies serve as data bases for the future. This way, a boy (Ade Ojeikere, for instance), who was registered in Government College, Ughelli, in 1990 as 11 years old, cannot emerge as Emokpaire Ojeikere in Hussey College, Warri, in 2013 as a 16-year-old footballer, simply on account of his small stature and baby face. Such a person would easily be detected through his biometric taken in 1990. However, such infallibility, of course, would depend on the integrity of the process because some corrupt people in the system could tamper with the data.

There is no doubt that Maigari has excelled in the task of changing the face of our soccer. Our national teams’ feats under his regime have been unbelievable. But he needs to reinvent the structures within the NFF by organising training courses where they can update their knowledge. Facilities in the NFF must also be modernised to be in sync with what obtains in other climes.

Nigeria, I dare say is a huge joke. Shameful things keep repeating themselves, yet we offer the same failed measures, simply because we enjoy copying others without studying how they do such things.

The concept of signing contracts with coaches arose from what obtains in other climes. But in those countries, such projects are funded on existing structures, making the task of fulfilling obligations less cumbersome.

Here, our coaches are, sadly, in a hurry to sign deals without recourse to the need to have a lawyer to witness such a contractual arrangement. Our coaches, having lobbied in high places to get their jobs, can’t be worried about the details of their deals. Most times, they get the jobs after a long absence from their previous assignments. The allure of the new deal blinds them to such an extent that they accept indebtedness as a norm than a misnomer.

Contract duly scripted by lawyers have extant clauses that take care of breaches and what the defaulter in the deal should pay as surcharge. As for our coaches, they want to have their cake and eat it. They are not prepared to spare few Naira from bumper deals to secure the services of lawyers. If duly signed contracts are struck by our coaches where their employers have hefty N50million sums for defaults, there would be a compelling need for them to look for the cash at all costs.

In Europe, coaches and players use agents and lawyers. They are the ones who deal directly with suitors and only tell their clients (the coaches) what they have done. Once a good deal is struck, the coaches are presented at a formal ceremony where dictates of the deal are either revealed or kept secret. What both parties want the public to hear is disseminated.

One can’t understand why our coaches cannot toe this path and let us see if our administrators will default. I feel pains for Stephen Keshi over his unpaid salaries, but he should have known that this arrangement didn’t start now. In negotiating his package, he should have gone for the Berti Vogts’ option of upfront payment. Keshi didn’t have the balls to do so for fear of losing the Super Eagles job or, possibly, be tagged unpatriotic.

But, why is funding difficult for our football even when we are African champions? It is simple. We don’t run the game as a business here. Government officials are unwilling to surrender the governance of the game to the private sector because of what they get.

Perhaps, if government officials had pushed for the repeal of Decree 101, like Sports Minister Bolaji Abdullahi is doing, the issue of adequate funding of the game would have been fixed. The way our football is governed, no company will touch it, as it cannot control how its cash is spent.

This disturbing trend will stop when the coaches’ salaries are tied to the government’s recurrent accounts. It would be foolhardy to expect the NFF to pay the coaches when the aggregate of what they earn across all the national teams is bigger than what the government allocates to it for a year. And to think that such subventions come in four quarters explains why what is happening to Keshi et al would persist.

It is sad that nine months after top businessmen doled out millions to the Eagles and their coaches, payment of the technical crew is still an issue. Our businessmen are in the habit of grandstanding, especially when the President is at the functions they attend.

Elsewhere, sport is funded with lotteries sourced from the public and the private sectors. This setting makes it impossible for any group of people to grandstand or do ambush marketing with their presence. On such occasions, firms that supported the system are celebrated and urged to do more.

Ceremonies such as that held at the Presidential Villa on February 11are conducted by the firms that bankroll the trip in conjunction with the federation. We saw how the federation chiefs stood by while the players and officials celebrated on February 11 at the Aso Villa. Such demeaning settings make the

federation chiefs look like upstarts before the corporate world.
Funding sports, not just football, has been a big problem, largely because most governments consider the industry as the platform to fix their friends and political cronies into government parastatals, having lost out on the “juicy” ones.
Overseas sponsorship is hinged on the carrot-and-stick approach in which sports friendly firms get tax rebates from the government for their contributions.
These structures are enduring because governance in those countries is a continuum, unlike here where every new government strives to destroy what it meets on the ground, no matter how credible, hiding under the cloak of change. Policy somersault is the biggest problem with our sport.
In Nigeria, there is absence of not just a template, but outright architectural base to anchor any policy, whether fleeting or enduring, as far as our sports are concerned. Given this obvious lacuna, what we have is usually “anything goes”. And it is progressively destroying every facet of our sports, ditto football.
It is this cumulative effect of the lack of a framework – or where it exists, no continuity that has been responsible for the albatross in our sports. Or how else do we explain a scenario where we have the same swan song running through our sports as regards funding and administration?
Elsewhere, there exist sports calendars anchored on four-year term or eight-year or even ten-year development plan; here we rely on cash from budgetary allocations that are never ready at the appointed time.
The sports calendar helps countries to plan. It also gives them the impetus to make projections meant to capture the lessons of the past. Besides, it is easier for the blue-chip firms to sponsor sports because the four-year term helps them to make a case for such an enterprise to their shareholders.
Indeed, most sports competitions are anchored on the four-yearly format. And wholesale cash projections are made, hence the seamless transmission from one sport event to the other.
Our history of poor preparations for sporting event is legendary. Our athletes don’t get the required support from government when others do. We believe in the last-minute rush. This gives room for profligacy from those in the system.
What the sports calendar does for European countries is that it gives them enough time to plan. Besides, lump sum cash instills confidence in the athletes just as it challenges them to excel to justify the huge investment from the government.
The lump sum from the government encourages the blue-chip firms to contribute their quota, knowing the importance that the government attaches to sports. This government intervention gives sports federations the impetus to source for funds and this will include getting the interested firms to build infrastructure, which could be named after their firms.
Government alone cannot fund sports. People and the firms must be involved. But how can people and firms support sports when, for political reasons, performing federation chieftains are removed as in the case of the Golf Federation where its president, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, lost his seat because of his squabble with the ruling party? How do we expect those who supported Oyinlola during his reign to back the sport, given the way he was stopped from contesting the federation’s election? This is the way sports die in this country. What a shame.
To think that governments at all levels have remained the biggest beneficiaries each time our national teams, be it the Eaglets, Flying Eagles or the Super Eagles, win trophies, makes it even the much sadder that despite this obvious reality, scant attention in terms of funding is accorded the sector.
In what area of our national life are we ranked positively high in the world if not football? Recall that immediately after the 1994 World Cup hosted by the US, Nigeria emerged from that outing to be ranked 5th in the world.
This explains why there was so much anticipation in the run-up to yesterday’s epic final between Nigeria and Mexico. The cost of PR from our victory against Mexico is unquantifiable. It cannot be measured in monetary terms.
Obviously, from tomorrow, governments at the federal, state and local council level will queue up to leverage on this victory, which none cared to invest in, except a few states like Cross River. From tomorrow also, both PDP and the embattled New PDP will put aside their slugfest to celebrate the Eaglets’ victory.
For two weeks, the country will literally set aside its challenges just because of the Eaglets’ victory.We expected the same passion during preparations but it never came.

Eagles should stop Ethiopia
A week from today in Calabar, the challenge will be for the Super Eagles to clinch the qualification ticket for the Brazil 2014 World Cup. And I’m excited given the showing of our players in their European clubs this past week.
Most of the players that Keshi picked did well and I expect them to sustain that tempo this weekend in the club matches. When our players do well in their clubs a week before crucial games, they run over their opponents. One only hopes that the key players don’t get injured. Those recuperating should not succumb to pressure from their managers to risk their injury for the club. The World Cup is any player’s dream. Now is the time for anyone to stamp his authority on the team by playing all Eagles’ games.
The prospect of Nigeria playing against Italy at the Cottage Stadium in England on November 18 is the real deal. Such games help raise the profile of the team and its players.

Even though one doesn’t expect a victory over the Italians, it would be a bonus if we do beat them. Yet the challenge on the coaches should be to have all those dressed for the game to have a feel of such top class opposition.
We need to have a squad wherein substitutions during matches help to galvanise the team than weaken it. And this can only happen when everyone is given a fair chance to play against any opposition in friendly games.
See you next week, dear readers.