NFF: Public funding requires scrutiny

‎‎By Godwin Dudu-Orumen 

‎Who owns Nigerian Football? ‎The people who built the game remain outside the room where its offices are shared. Where are the footballers?

‎Not only the famous ones who appear on television when the Super Eagles are playing. I mean the men and women who came through Nigerian clubs, survived the local league, represented the country, and then spent years in serious football systems abroad. They have seen how clubs recruit, train, insure and protect players. They know what a functioning academy looks like. They know why some leagues sell and others merely survive.

‎Where are these people when Nigerian football is being run?

‎‎Playing the game does not, by itself, qualify anyone to administer it. Some former internationals would make poor executives, just as some people who never played professionally understand organisation, finance and governance. That is not the argument. The point is simpler: Nigeria has exported football knowledge for more than half a century and has made almost no organised effort to bring it back into the system.

‎‎Instead, the road into football administration is easier to navigate for those who understand politics. The familiar figures return: the political jobber, the delegate counter, the committee regular, the hustler who has never built a club, discovered a player, maintained a pitch, or risked his own money in the game, but knows how to enter the room where football offices are shared.

‎‎These men inherit value others created:. players they did not train. supporters they did not gather. national teams, they did not build. stadia paid for from the public purse. A reputation carried by generations of footballers, many of whom left the game with little more than damaged knees and old photographs. ‎Then the new custodians behave like owners.

‎‎The question of skin in the game matters. A club owner can lose his investment. An academy owner can lose his livelihood. A former player can lose a name built over twenty years. What does the career football politician lose when the league decays or a national team fails? Usually, an office. In our system, even that loss can be temporary.

‎‎This is how the game becomes another branch of politics. Elections matter more than development. Delegates matter more than supporters. Loyalty matters more than ability. The money attached to office helps preserve the alliances that keep it. Football begins to finance the people holding it hostage.

‎At that point, somebody mentions FIFA. Government must not interfere.

‎‎FIFA is right about one thing. The government should not appoint the president of a football federation. A minister should not pick the national team, dismiss a board at will, or rewrite an election result. Nigerian politicians have not earned the benefit of the doubt when institutions and patronage are involved. Football needs room to run its own affairs.

‎‎But that principle has been stretched well beyond its proper meaning. Independence from political control is not freedom from the law. It is not freedom from audit. It is certainly not freedom from answering questions about public money.

‎‎That leaves a harder question. What happens when an organisation sustained by the public purse invokes international autonomy to resist public scrutiny? The answer begins with the two names under which Nigerian football lives.

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