I Need Another Mandate to Make

The four-year tenure of the Amaju Pinnick-led board of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) elected on September 30, 2014 in Warri, Delta State will run to a close next week. Already, fresh elections have been scheduled to hold on Thursday in Katsina, with most members of the outgoing executive committee seeking fresh mandates to return for another four years in charge of the Beautiful Game in the country.Just before Pinnick left Nigeria on Tuesday afternoon for Accra as leader of the FIFA/CAF delegation to put in place a Normalisation Committee to run Ghana’s football, the Vice President of the Confederation of African Football, took time to speak with DURO IKHAZUAGBE on his stewardship in the past four years, his achievements and challenges. He also spoke of his desire to accomplish the mission of making Nigerian football become self-reliant. Excerpt...

Can you give us a run down of the achievements of your board and why you think you deserve another term at the Glass House in Abuja?

I want to say that from the very beginning, we had a vision of where we are taking Nigerian football to. Our vision was built on youth development, sustainable football culture and capacity building. We actually started with capacity building because we realised that it was the foundation on which every other things we planned to achieve will be placed upon. Anything built on a faulty foundation was not going to stand. I gave myself the mandate to ensure that in eight years from my first day in office, a Nigerian referee should be qualified to officiate at the World Cup. Nigeria is too big and important in football not to have her officials referring at the summit of the game or in the global scene. At that point, we then decided to take about 40 Nigerian referees to England for training. And on their return, they started getting invitations for big matches globally. That was the first thing we did. We also took coaches for training. Two of the coaches we took on that capacity building programme, Florence Omagbemi and Anne Chiejene won the African Women’s Nations Cup. That was a direct impact of the programme. Then again, we took administrators for similar capacity building for them to really know how to handle football development at the grassroots level. They all went to England for the training. Today, if you look at the Congress of the NFF there is now quality unlike before when ethnicity and ‘who you know’ was all that you need to be part of that August assembly. What is on the mind of these people now is football development. That is what informed the need to take these critical stakeholders in the country’s football on the capacity building programme to England. Those were the first three things we did on coming on board.

And of course because we wanted a self sustaining NFF, we went about getting key players in the Nigerian economy to come under one roof to rub minds on how they can be of assistance in the new vision we have for Nigeria football. But unfortunately, the very day we scheduled for that event at the highbrow Eko Hotel in Lagos, a court process stopped us from achieving that but a few companies like Zenith Bank, Emzor, Taleveras and several others that made it to the venue, gave us sponsorship to kick start this vision of self reliance. I am 100 per cent sure that if that event had took place as planned by now NFF would have become self-sustaining by now. We used our contacts extensively to let them know why football should be liberated from government in terms of funding. Government controls football by providing enabling environment like security and facilities but securing funding from the private sector would have reduced dependence on government all the time.

In this last four years, we also looked at the professional league and strengthened it with the creation of the League Management Company. Some of the reforms carried out returned the NPFL to amongst the best leagues in Africa today. Board room points became a thing of the past, teams went to play away matches without fears of harassment from the home team fans, and above all, a place like Maiduguri that has been starved of league matches due to the insurgency in that part of the country began to see their darling team El Kanemi play home matches at home. We entered into partnership with airlines flying teams to play there. Security agencies gave back up. It drew wide plaudits from home and abroad that even BBC reported the first match there.

How did you achieve all these with some of the key sponsors pulling out of their deals with NFF at the inception of your administration?

I must confess, it was difficult for us. We had some of the key sponsors we inherited pulling out due to certain things that happened before we took charge. First was Adidas. We didn’t know why. We made countless trips to their headquarters with no result. They didn’t tell why. At that point Nigeria was supposed to be a beautiful bride having just on the AFCON 2013 and qualified for the World Cup in Brazil amongst other successes recorded by the previous board. Why did they pull out? They didn’t tell but we later realised why. We cannot put them in public space now due to what transpired. But it was most unfortunate that the former administrators allowed that to happen. It was a big minus for the NFF. The first day that I signed a document to purchase jerseys for Nigeria, I wept. It touched me that a football-playing nation like Nigeria with almost 200 million people, we are buying jerseys instead of enjoying sponsorship from any of the major sportswear companies as it were in time past. It was at that point that we went all out and didn’t just get any brand but NIKE. When we got NIKE there was no money attached to the contract. But if you look at what was coming to the federation as kits and equipment as well as bonuses, we believe it was good enough. We knew it was very difficult for NIKE to return to Nigeria but we were going to get them renegotiate at the expiration of the contract without cash. Today, NIKE is very happy with Nigeria. They have conducted an integrity test on the NFF and it’s leadership and are satisfied with the result. Now, they have made an offer to us and we are studying it. Our Marketing Committee is studying it and will make its report to the executive committee. We will then tell Nigerians what they are offering us and why they are offering it. What they are proposing is an eight-year tenure contract with the NFF. Part of what we are requesting from them is to have their factory in our export free trade zone in Nigeria where they will be producing NIKE products. Most of the NIKE products are not produced in the USA. They are produced in their satellite factories in Indonesia under their standards. Indonesia is not better than Nigeria. We have the labour force here too. If that happens, you just imagine the value chain and what Nigeria stands to benefit. From production to marketing and other ancillary benefits, it’s going to be huge for us. We would have succeeded in impacting the Nigerian economy with that singular contract. That is our dream of making football an integral part of the economy.

If you recall what happened in England in the early 1990s, the English government gave a seed money of £200million as loan to upgrade their stadia and facilities. Today, the English government gets over a £1billion or more in taxes from football. Take for instance, if the English Premier League’s grosses £6billion a year, 30 to 40per cent of that money goes to government as taxes. That is what we are aiming to do with football in Nigeria. It is a clear vision and we are on course to making that happen here also. But to achieve that, the government needs to create the enabling environment to make that possible. I want to specially thank President Muhamadu Buhari for saving Nigerian football at the point he did through Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. His intervention saved over 60 million Nigerian youths. Football is more than a passion here in Nigeria. The ripple effect of what would have happen if the President didn’t intervene would have been left imagined. We are not where we want to take Nigerian football yet but we believe we can take our football to become self-sustaining. We are 65 to 70 per cent of where we are going. As I speak to you now, there are four deals on the table. If we are able to conclude those deals, I can tell you that in the next one and half years we can tell government, “Thank you for funding football, we can now stand on our own and fund all our football activities.”

You came in at a time things were really tough for the NFF, how difficult was it convincing Corporate Nigeria to partner the federation with you in charge?

It was very tough I must tell you. To Corporate Nigeria the NFF was a filthy place. There are certain things that we know as leaders that we cannot come out to speak about here. There were so many things that we should rather not talk about here now. For us to be able to make them look in our direction as a new board, we went ahead to get international consultants to make us look good in the new mission to rebrand the NFF. That was why we went for Financial Derivatives as our financial consultants, PwC as our auditors and Baines & Company as our management consultants. So if we were going to negotiate a deal and introduce Bismarck Rewane as our financial consultants and Uyi Akpata from PwC as our auditors, people began to look at us differently that something new was happening in NFF. That became our MO (Modus of Operation). At that point, we started attracting sponsors who believed their investments were safe with our NFF. These people agreed to partner us because they know the background of members of our board and where we are coming from. The level of trust became appreciative to the point of doing business with us. I must confess the recent court crisis almost dented all that gain made until the Presidency intervention. The last three weeks have been good to enable us conclude some of the Programmes we have on the table. When people say yes, we collected this or that, we have no problem with that as all. Our deals are open for scrutiny. Our partnership with AITEO is N1.2 billion a year. It is captured in our budget. It is for the AITEO Cup, payment of salaries of coaches and the AITEO/NFF Award. We also have our Football Houses. The essence of building these football houses is for us to have good grassroots football administration. After training them in England, they need offices to operate. Normally, they operate from one cubicle or room in the ministry of youth and sport. We want them to have places to operate from and key into FIFA Connect programme. Once you are connected any player discovered at that level is entered into the database of the system. This ensures that such a player can no longer change his or her name and age. There is a record of him or her to whelp avoid situations of age cheating in our football. Such moves strengthen us and makes for integrity checks possible. We have six of such houses waiting to be commissioned. In the next 12 months, six more are going to be commissioned around the country. AITEO is sponsorship all these. In the next two years, we want to have football houses all over the country. After that, we will have to pitches per