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By Chinedum Ezeaku
The office of the Secretary of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) is for career civil servants and should not be seeing as being political which it has been more than a decade now.
The late Chief Taiwo Ogunjobi (may God bless his soul) and Dr Mohammed Sanusi (the incumbent) were able to get to that position because there was no qualified civil servant at the time they came board the reason they were engaged on contract.
Dr Sanusi should not have spent more than 4 years as a contract staff when he joined NFF in 2007, but because anything goes in Nigeria he has remained on that job. It is time Nigerian football be placed on the right pedestal for us to get to the desired heights and destinations and go back to our glorious days in the 90s when we won the 1994 Nations Cup, the Atlanta 1996 football gold medal (the first by any African country), our players were crowned African Footballers of the Year; Rashidi Yekini in 1993, Emmanuel Amunike in 1994, Kanu Nwankwo 1996 and 1999 and Victor Ikpeba in 1997.
The civil service rules only permits 4 years maximum as a contract staff in Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDA) which NFF is one, but Dr Sanusi spent 17 years in office.
It is good that the National Sports Commission (NSC) is back on board and one of its core mandates is to professionalise the sports industry in Nigeria. Putting a political-inclined person in a positions that are strictly for professionals will not augur well for our sports in general and football in particular. Doing so would rather retard any development or growth as far as sports is concerned.
Football is a serious business and it should be left for professionals in that field. Any outsider coming into the field is only coming to learn on the job and which is going to be counter productive.
The question is: What becomes of career civil servant that have spent all their years serving in that office and when it comes to career progression were pressed down by bringing an outsider to be their boss. Will that be fair and good for Nigerian sports? The answer is definitely NO.
The Federal Government should not allow an outsider in the sports field to come near sports administration again in Nigeria. It is good that the Federal Government under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has appointed core professionals to man our sports through the appointments of Mallam Shehu Dikko and Chief Bukola Olawale Olopade as Chairman and Director General of the National Sports Commission (NSC) respectively. Dikko and Olopade are no doubt round pegs in round holes and Nigerian sports will be good for it. The duo are sports gurus.
We cannot continue to do things the same way and expect different results. We must rather embrace change in our national life of which sports play a very critical role and get to the highest level as it is done the world over. Nigeria cannot be an exception.
