Buhari
Kojo William
Former boss of the Nigeria Football Federation, Anthony Kojo-Williams, in
this interview with JOHN EGBOKHAN challenges President-elect Mohammadu Buhari to run sports the way he wants to fight corruption.
Excerpts
How has our football fared under President Goodluck Jonathan?
Our football has not grown under the outgoing leadership. The success we think we achieved by winning the 2013 AFCON was a fluke, when put in the context of things happening to the team now.
The concept of development is something that those managing our football do not even understand. When you talk about development, you have to talk about many things, from the right structures, youth development, school sports programme, proper club management and the right frame work for the national teams. We are still playing primitive football and that is a function of the kind of leadership we have
We have no plan for clubs. The only noise we make is when our national teams are playing, yet we don’t care about the development of the players. Most of the coaches in the country do not have the proper certification to coach the players and we think they are suitable to handle the national teams.
Buhari
Buhari
They are not because even though we have talents in this country, we still need the right coaches so that the talents will have good transition. It is one thing to have talents. It is another to get them transit from the potentials that they are to finished products. That’s where we get it wrong and it is because we lack the qualified and certificated coaches.
What bothers me is that you can’t isolate sports from the rot in the system, until we have an able government, with vision, a government that can enact the proper legislation to ensure that multinational companies invest in sports, I make bold to say that we are not going anywhere.
That is why this outgoing government failed in terms of developing our football, ditto for sports. I had a chat with the D.G. of the Stock Exchange who wanted to know how company can invest in sports and my response illuminated his mind. .
The best team we have had remains the 1994 team and that was so because the right persons managed the team. Players were always in camp then because the government of that time, was supportive and not meddling like this President did with the issue of Stephen Keshi.
I wish we were able to build on the gains of the 1994 team but we destroyed it with poor leadership. These days, things have been turned upside down, with some players being called home-based. In those days, all the players were the same. Now, we have set that segregation pattern, which is affecting our players’ psyche.
Now we don’t even have a vibrant professional league and yet we still call players home-based. We are not helping these players. I recall that over 30 years ago, we used to have the possibles and the probables in our team .We had solid players form the academicals, who were the breeding ground for the national teams But now, everything has been killed by poor leadership.
But it was not that bad under the outgoing President?
It was very bad because we didn’t develop and whatever we won a fluke.
The junior teams, who won were over the stipulated age limit. You want to talk about Blessing okagbare in track and field? Will you attribute her Commonwealth Games success to Nigeria? Common, you know how it happened? And should a country like Nigeria have only one top athlete? What has the government done for track and field federation?
And what is the structure of the federation? How buoyant are they and what plans do they have? When you talk about real development, the coaches should show the way but in our case, they are not qualified. All our coaches are not qualified. When you don’t have qualified coaches, what you do is to get expatriate coaches, who can do the job.
We must have structure in place, all the coaches should have a philosophy, which has to run down the system, they must play into space, run into space, one-touch football, which sadly, we don’t have here and there is no way we can develop that way. All these happened because of the wrong leadership. Ghana and Ivory Coast realised that their coaches were not good enough and went for expatriates, who delivered results at the last AFCON.
In modern football, you have to be technical, you have to understand the dynamics of moving the ball from defence to the attack quickly. Even the goalkeeper has a role to play in this style of football. Football is about philosophy. Nigeria has not developed its own football philosophy and the next challenge is to have an identity. Teams like
Kojo William
Kojo William
Barcelona, Real Madrid have their philosophies and that is the way to go..
So unlike Jonathan, you feel that our football will thrive under President-elect Mohammadu Buhari?
President Jonathan did not have a vision, which didn’t help our football development because if he had, he would not have asked the NFF not to sack the coach. When you you have a military training like Muhammadu Buhari, who is more exposed than all the people we have around, you can be sure that things will take a new shape when he comes on-board.
A military person has about the best training to lead a society. I am talking from experience because I was a cadet in the UK military and as an officer, you are trained to be bold, analytical in things, you are trained to understand tactics and above all, bold.
When they were attacking Buhari of not having a certificate, I felt people were ignorant because there is no way Buhari would have risen to that position in the military without having the required certificates. They learn about policy statements, they write thesis or projects, and pass examinations. They are sound to the core and are exposed more than the civilians you have in power..
Agenda for Buhari
I want him to get the right people to run sports. He should run sports the way he wants to fight corruption. That will also develop the youths who have been abandoned by the leaders.
Eagles and Keshi
I get angry when I hear people call our national team Super Eagles. They are not super at all because they have not done anything super in the last 10 years. They are ordinary. I remember asking Aminu Maigari when he was in office, how many times the Eagles trained daily and he said they only trained once for an hour under Keshi.
I told him that they were not going anywhere, with that regimen, which later showed as they were not fit . In the days leading to 1994, Eagles trained three times a day at Ota and sometimes two times. I asked why he didn’t call Keshi to order and he responded that Keshi said that was the way it is done. So that explained why the players always tired out easily. It is after building up their fitness level and during competition that you may train once a day in order not to burn them out.
That is why I continue to maintain that Keshi’s era has come and gone. He was a great ambassador of Nigeria. But you have to understand that being a very good player does not qualify one to become a successful coach. To be a good coach, you must have the proper certification and prove it on a consistent basis on the pitch.
In today’s Nigeria, all ex-players want to coach the national team. It does not work like that. They have to get the proper certification and prove their mettle from the clubs to the junior national teams before they can get into the senior level.
If I bring a coach from Serbia and pay him less than N5m, he will do better than our local coaches
But is that not colonial mentality?
It is not. I believe in Nigeria, our doctors are excelling because they are qualified, have gone to through the right certifications and examinations to get to where they are. So why can’t our coaches go through such tests? we have not exposed our coaches, NFF has not sat down to plan for our coaches. They just want success overnight.
Our coaches must prove themselves. And the coaches must help themselves too. I look forward to the day our coaches will win the World Cup. It is possible. If we set up a good league structure, then our football will grow again.
The doctor of the Super Eagles in 1994, Dr. Amao was asked to do a report on where we got the stamina from because our players were so fit at the World Cup. He did an excellent report, which FIFA commended. He is a Nigerian, so why can’t our coaches improve their profiles by getting the right training?
We have everything to be great but allow selfish deeds to undermine our growth. I hope and pray that our football will thrive again, What was practiced in the last six years was bad. Nigerians were enslaved, it was apartheid in a different colour.
Amokachi as Eagles stand-in coach
Our standards have so fallen that we know longer know which coaches to allow handle our teams. Amokachi has not got the right certification to handle such a position.
- See more at: http://www.vanguardngr.com/2015/04/buhari-should-tackle-corruption-sports-same-way-kojo/#sthash.kcMnn3g6.dpuf
