Just moments after Burkina Faso’s fourth goal from a free kick slid under the diving Flying Eagles goalkeeper Clinton Lawani in the WAFU B final of the 2027 U20 AFCON qualifying tournament, my phone rang.
At the other end of the call was a senior NFF official. He was full of excitement as if he had won a million-dollar lottery.
He said the day of reckoning is upon us as earlier that same day, the Super Falcons had also crashed out of the 2026 WAFCON and they will now have to battle to qualify for the 2027 World Cup, a tournament they never failed to qualify for since it was founded in 1991.
“I can beat my chest and tell you that 99.9% of the staff of the NFF secretariat are celebrating tonight that both the Super Falcons and Flying Eagles crashed,” he started out.
“We have been praying for such a day.
“The morale of those at the secretariat is at an all-time low because they have been made redundant as only a handful of them now get to do the job.
“It has never been so bad and they all want a drastic change because this cannot continue for much longer.”
Reactions from outside the Glass House to the latest lows to hit Nigerian football have been even more damning – NFF president Ibrahim Gusau and his cronies have no business seeking re-election after four years riddled with ineptitude, failure and missed opportunities.
It is most ironic that despite the many billions of Naira from the Federal Government, the welfare of the players and officials has been hugely compromised by the NFF, more like the case of the state governments receiving much more federal allocations and the people not feeling it.
National team selections are now for the highest bidders, no longer for the top talent and so Yohanna Zadok was overlooked by both the Golden Eaglets and the Flying Eagles only to be signed by a Premier League club for a record fee just eight months after he left Nigeria in frustration.
Adequate preparations by the national teams to major competitions have been replaced by false prophets, holy pilgrimages and marabouts.
With a jet-set lifestyle that their positions have afforded them in the last few years, it would be a fantasy to expect the NFF executive committee to resign on the back of the unmitigated disasters they have put Nigeria through time and again.
The September 27 elections in Lafia is a selection process as all the key positions have been shared among state FA chairmen.
This has been so since 2008, when FCT FA chairman Sani Lulu got through the dubious and oboxious NFF Statutes that has taken football in Nigeria many, many years backwards.
Both the NFF congress and the executive committee are dominated by state FA chairmen at the expense of the growth and success of the country’s No 1 sport.
The rut that has since bedevilled Nigerian football has deepened so much so that a country so blessed with abundant talent can no longer hold its own even in West Africa.
The recent 2026 World Cup was the saddest reminder of just how far Nigerian football has so regressed, while the rest of the world was celebrating the biggest and most financially successful Mundial.
Millions of Nigerians were forced to follow other teams because the Super Eagles did not qualify again for the World Cup even when 10 other African countries – from Cape Verde to Morocco – graced this global football showpiece event.
It is the gross ineptitude of the NFF today that rather than generate revenue through sponsorships, they now rely on Federal Government intervention funds.
What did you expect when the NFF president saddled his very limited friend with the chairmanship of two of the most important committees – the marketing and technical committees?
Nigerian football is in desperate need of a total overhaul because the statutes has shut out critical stakeholders from the polity and instead empowered state FA chairmen to feed fat on the common wealth and throw merit and competence to the dogs.
The media, who ought to be the watch dogs, have now been put to sleep with crumbs and so what we now have is a failed system that is not accountable and result-driven.
This MUST not continue.
The ritual of another NFF election has to stop so that a new governance structure with a larger and much more representative congress made up of critical stakeholders, who have the capacity and genuine interest to grow the game, is put in place for the country to rise above mediocrity to fulfill its huge potentials.
