Nigerian Factor...Again

Over the years the fact the Nigerian nation constitutes of so many tribes and culture has been more of a curse rather than a blessing to our National development. This has resulted in the need to keep everybody happy in terms of appointments to jobs in the Federal government and to an extent in the state government level as well.

Otherwise known as the Federal character, it has come to be known as one of the many "Nigerian Factors", some of those things we just have live with.As a result we are made to live with a system where mediocrity is upheld as more qualified people have been over looked for jobs because their quota has been taken up in other positions. We do not just lose a chance to benefit from such talents and may end up losing them to the private sector or even to other countries, but of course end up with the worst available people for vital jobs.

Football like other sectors of our national life has suffered from this anomaly, especially in appointment of coaches for the national teams. In the last two months, Nigeria has performed poorly in different competitions for both men and women. These performances were all down to poor coaching.

In keeping with the federal character, the coaching job in Nigeria has been distributed across the political zones of Nigeria without putting their abilities into consideration. As such there is no room for respected and successful coaches as long as there quota is already taken up.

Take the women teams, when Effiom Ntiero, who has been the most successful coach in women football in Nigeria was sacked(for reasons still unclear to us), Jossy Lad, who if I recall correctly hasn't done anything significant in football since wining the league with Leventis Utd in 1986, was appointed, in order to make up for the lack of western representation. The result is that the Super Falcons failed to win the African women Championships for the first time since 1991, with the same group of players who won the championships so convincingly two years ago.

Again, after sacking Eaglets’ coach Alphonsus Dike was sacked, the NFF appointed Henry Nwosu, who has no history of working with young players, just to make sure that the Eastern quota doesn't end up in different political zone. Granted we have not really seen him work as yet, but if reports of his approach to the job so far are anything to go by, he has already taken the wrong steps (he is reported to be watching NPL league matches to scout for U-17 players!).

The fact remains that Nigerian football will not make any significant progress if we don't start making appointments ON MERIT.