2017 AFCON: Why We Failed

2013 AFCON: Distant Memory

It’s the day after we have failed once again to qualify for Africa’s biggest football showpiece, the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON). I still have a heavy heart. The disgust still lingers on almost 12 hours after the game as I write this. Gone are the days when we castigated our coaches for winning bronze medals at AFCON. Now, we can’t even qualify again. How on earth did we get to this situation? Here are some of the major reasons I think are responsible:

FOOTBALL ADMINISTRATION

The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) under Amaju Pinnick has since September

2014, overseen a dark period for Nigeria football especially when it concerns the

Amaju Pinnick: Overseen More Failures Than Results

country’s flagship team, the Super Eagles. As much as the U-17 team, the U-23 and the Super Falcons have won laurels in the last two years of Amaju's tenure, the inability to qualify for consecutive AFCON is failure personified. And this comes from making choices that have turned out to be disastrous. The obvious one was appointing former captain Sunday Oliseh as coach of the team. From what I’ve gathered, appointing Oliseh wasn’t a unanimous decision by the Executive Committee of the NFF. If it had turned out successful, no one would be talking about it. But it didn’t. Sunday Oliseh oversaw one of the worst reigns of any Super Eagles manager (I’d get to that in a bit). So, the failure of Oliseh goes all the way back to failure of the NFF who appointed him.

Oliseh The Saviour or Quitter? 

Appointing Oliseh isn’t just the only anomaly of the NFF in recent years. There have been too many misplaced priorities and half-truths projected to Nigerians. Sometime last year, Pinnick publicly announced that the NFF had reached a deal with a commercial bank to foot the bills of the then Super Eagles manager, Sunday Oliseh. There was so much fanfare made about that deal and the football house got enough praise from fans and the press for it. Fast forward months later, the inability of the football house to pay the bills of the coach was one of the reasons given by the manager for leaving the position. I was reliably informed by two members of the Executive Committee that the supposed deal with the commercial bank had not been concluded. So why on earth would you come out publicly to talk about a deal when it is yet to be concluded? I don’t even want to start talking about the kit deal reportedly reached with Nike. That also has been enmeshed in so much controversy.

As if these were not enough, at a time when the NFF has been crying about lack of funds due to the harsh economic situation, there were still funds to take members of the congress which comprised state FA Chairmen and Secretaries to a ‘Capacity Building’ in London. This was at a time that the salaries of some of the national team coaches as well as bonuses of some of the national team players had not been paid (some haven’t been paid till now I gather). I was told that a bank actually foot the bill for the training. And I ask: would it not have been better to channel those funds to better use? If the money used for the Capacity Building had been used to settle Oliseh’s salaries, would we have come to the situation where a coach would ‘abandon’ his job three weeks to a crucial qualifier?

SUNDAY OLISEH

And that brings me to another reason why we will not be on the plane to Gabon next year. Former coach Sunday Oliseh can point to all the inadequacies he had to put up with from the NFF; he can point to the lack of motivation in terms of non- payment of salaries and bonuses; he can as well point to his statistics of losing just one competitive game in 14 matches and rightly so; but truth of the matter is that his reign remains one of the most cantankerous reigns of any of Super Eagles manager.

It is on record that under his tenure, former captain Vincent Enyeama retired from international football after an unnecessary public spat. Under him, Nigeria failed to get out of the group stages of the Championship for African Nations (CHAN) – a tournament we had finished as bronze medalists before he came into the picture.

Africa's Guardiola? Naaaaaaa! Not Even Close 

And to make matters worse, three weeks to the biggest games of his managerial career, he decides to leave his position. From my experience of covering the CHAN tournament in Rwanda, it was quite obvious Oliseh lacked the mental strength and decorum to manage the Super Eagles. As a player, his fiery and hot temper was public knowledge. Years after retiring, one would have expected the former captain to have mellowed down. Unfortunately, Oliseh had not. On the eve of Nigeria’s final group game at CHAN against Guinea, a simple question from me to him on what his message to fans would be if he ended up not qualifying for the knock-out stages of the competition, elicited a response that showed how petty Oliseh can be. He went on a rant that ended with him asking me to pack my bags and leave Rwanda if all I came to the press conference to do was to be negative. Just because I was probably the only journalist at the presser who was bold enough to look at the possibility of Nigeria losing and not qualifying? Weeks later, he went a step further and put out video calling critics “insane”.

As far as I am concerned, oliseh saw the enormity of battling Egypt, saw he had burnt a lot of bridges with the NFF and most fans and decided to take the easy way out to avoid being technically responsible for Nigeria’s failure to secure an AFCON ticket. Unfortunately, he can’t run away from this dark shadow. He also shares part of the blame….

TO BE CONTINUED

CREDITS
Pictures courtesy goal.com and pulseng.com 

This article first appeared as a column Sixth Sense on Independent Monitor on Thursday March 31st, 2016.