ANALYSIS: Nigeria face FIFA ban after government interference

By Samm Audu Jul 1, 2010, 8:13 GMT

Pretoria - Nigeria faces a ban from the ruling body FIFA after its government interfered with football affairs by withdrawing all teams from international competition and, by implication, dissolving the domestic football association.

The Nigerian government on Wednesday suspended all the country's teams from international competitions for the next two years and officials asked FIFA to set up an interim committee in place of the executive committee of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF).

The move came in the wake of a poor performance of the Super Eagles at the 2010 World Cup where they went out winless in the group stage, losing to Argentina and Greece and drawing with South Korea.

The immediate consequence of the self-imposed ban is that Nigerian women's teams will not feature at the upcoming Under-20 and Under-17 World Cups.

Nigeria will also not take part in qualifying for the 2012 Africa Cup of Nations, which was due to start September with a match against Madagascar.

The Chairman of the Presidential Task Force for the 2010 World Cup, Rotimi Amaechi, told reporters on Wednesday that it recommended to the government to take such measures because of 'the gross misapplication of funds witnessed at the World Cup.'

The government said an auditing of all the expenditure at the 2010 World Cup and the reorganisation of football structure during this two-year hibernation will be carried out immediately.

The NFF was yet to be officially informed and has made no official statement.

But a top NFF official told the German News Agency, dpa, that this was simply the culmination of the frustration of the Nigerian government in its bid to stop the executive committee of the Nigeria FA from a second term in office.

Elections into the NFF board are due on August 21 with incumbent president, Sani Lulu, along with the bulk of his executives.

Lulu commands the following of his board as well as the 44-man congress which has the power to elect him for a second four-year term.

In the build-up to the 2010 World Cup, the director-general of the National Sports Commission (NSC), Patrick Ekeji, ordered the NFF to suspend the electoral process so that all the focus will be on the country's preparation for the World Cup.

The NFF insisted that they do not have the power to do so as it was their congress that approved the time table for the elections.

Sports minister Ibrahim Bio led a delegation which met with FIFA president Joseph Blatter in Johannesburg, asking FIFA to postpone the NFF elections and delay payment of Nigeria's World Cup participation fee at the World Cup because the NFF leadership was corrupt.

FIFA said it does not have the power to stop the elections and that the government will have to prove that the NFF are corrupt.

The Nigerian government has interfered in football matters in the past before NFF statutes were acceped in 2006.

In 1996, Nigeria dictator, General Sani Abacha, stopped the Super Eagles from defending their Africa Cup of Nations crown in South Africa after a political row with Nelson Mandela. Nigeria was banned from the next two editions of the Nations Cup, but the punishment was later reduced to one edition (1998).

Nigeria's football is mainly funded by the government, but in the last four years the NFF have done creditably well in sourcing for funds from corporate sponsors to such an extent that almost half of their expenditure is now from such sponsorship.