That some Nigerians harbour a deep hatred for their country is restating the obvious. They have varied reasons for their hatred, heavily camouflaged in political and sectional garments. When you hear expressions like “No be una vote for Tinubu”, such a Nigerian is still aggrieved over the outcome of the presidential election conducted in 2023, which is a ‘valid ground’ to spew hatred for anything that may be going on in the country, positive or negative regardless.
When some of our kinsmen wear any of these garments, especially politically soaked, they suddenly transform into experts in concocted narratives. Let’s consider this as a teaser. A bullion van escort policeman I met at a bank last week dished out a graphic, blow-by-blow lecture of how Russian engineers had arrived in Ouagadougou and had dismantled the ‘engine’ (he said there was only an engine) of Nigeria’s C-130 Hercules military logistic plane detained in Burkina Faso for unauthorised landing two weeks ago. His ‘students’ too were equally impressed by the policeman’s impressive first-person narrative until a few bank officials became uncomfortable with the lecture, which was progressively degenerating into an argument when there was an attempt to point out the many holes in the cop’s concocted story.
Conversely, there are Nigerians who believe that despite the multi-dimensional challenges of the country, they owe it a duty to remain not just patriotic but hopeful that with time (we hope so), our collective lot will experience a divine turnaround. Their patriotism and optimism might be built on hope for very obvious reasons, as Nigeria itself defies logical reasoning. One of these Nigerians is David Adeleke, popularly called Davido, who is staking $25,000 on Nigeria’s Super Eagles beating Tanzania’s Taifa Stars in their opening AFCON Group C match in Fez on Tuesday. No, I’m not staking any money, even if I have $25,000, if that’s your next guess.
As I warned of slips after the Super Eagles made the play-off in their ill-fated bid to qualify for the 2026 World Cup in a very weak group in October, I might be the only patriotic voice who refuses to build his confidence on a sandy foundation, that our dear Super Eagles won’t win the AFCON in Morocco this year. They may win the next one, which I equally doubt. I’m already mentally prepared for some of the punches that some of my readers will throw at me for this unpopular, pessimistic position.
Like most things Nigerian, we are married to outstanding outcomes without preparing for the process leading to them. A serious-minded organisation plans the next phase of its goal, realising that failure (at its last attempt) is not a disaster but a teacher, which teaches it how not to do it wrongly in its next attempt. In our own system, a failed attempt is an attraction to complicate the next phase so that the template for failure will be laid, and very properly, too.
After the Super Eagles failed to qualify for their first World Cup in 28 years in 2022, largely due to shoddy preparations, arrangements and internal squabbles, one would have thought that a more-focussed planning would have been put in place to avoid the mistakes of the past. That will be absolutely ‘unNigerian’. To start the process of failure, three different coaches were engaged by the Nigerian Football Federation to manage the team within one year after the AFCON 2023 coach, Jose Peseiro, who guided the Eagles to the final of the competition, was sacked.
Attention was instead concentrated by the Amaju Pinnick-led Nigerian Football Federation on how the $2m received from FIFA would be spent without executing the stadium projects the fund was meant to execute. I’m still at a loss as to why the last NFF exco members haven’t been arraigned by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission for this disgraceful fraud.
Sadly, the stadium meant for Ugborodo, in Delta State, a state where Pinnick hails from, is a project not completed, with about $400,000 paid out of $1.18m. Where is the rest of the money? Where is the thief holding it?
These fraudsters aren’t my focus in this piece, but the Super Eagles’ chances at the current AFCON, and why and what I believe we need to revive to achieve success and return to our place as a world beater in football. Some of the current players in the national team are stars in their own right. Unfortunately, there is no Super Eagles team, which is why you cannot decipher any playing pattern or philosophy in their matches, especially as noticed during the match against the Democratic Republic of Congo in the final match of the Africa 2026 World Cup qualifying playoff in Morocco in November.
It is incontestable that Nigeria can afford to hire a world-class coach for the national team, but certain interests in the NFF have always ensured the engagement of average, technically deficient coaches for the senior national teams. You may wish to recollect that the Super Eagles lost the 2023 AFCON final to hosts Cote d’Ivoire, parading a very weak team, due to a defective technical strategy employed by the coach after Troos Ekong scored an early goal in the first half of the final match. The Super Eagles, which had one of the best attacking line-ups in the competition, chose to defend the lone goal instead of attacking the already intimidated Elephants, a strategy that predictably backfired.
To be very specific, Coach Eric Chelle, the current coach of the senior national team, is unfortunately not a coach who will take the Super Eagles higher than their current average level. He doesn’t seem to be ready to do better than what he has done so far.
You will identify a coach who is ready to build an enduring national team from scratch by his hunger to discover and develop local talent who will be the foundation of his project. Dutchman, Clemens Westerhof, who coached the Super Eagles between August 1989 and July 1994, employed this strategy perfectly to achieve progressively positive results with the team. From his debut match, where Nigeria lost 0-1 to Cameroon in Yaounde on August 27, 1989, in a 1990 World Cup qualifier, Westerhof’s team won bronze in 1992 and won the 1994 Africa Cup of Nations in Tunisia.
The Super Eagles also qualified for the round of 16 at the 1994 World Cup in the US, where they lost to eventual finalists Italy 2-1. The Super Eagles, which were feared by other teams globally, were justifiably ranked 5th in the world going into the 1994 World Cup, Africa’s highest-ever FIFA ranking.
What was Westerhof’s strategy? He scouted for promising local talent, developed them, and exposed them to foreign opportunities where such talent grew and blossomed productively. This crop of players grew so strong during Westerhof’s tenure and could confidently compete against any national football teams in the world. The Dutchman left the national team with his head held high.
Since the gold-winning outing of the Dream Team (Nigeria’s U-23 football team) at the Atlanta Olympic in 1996, the Super Eagles coaches, except Austin Eguavoen, the late Stephen Keshi and the late Amodu Shuaibu, have perfected the lazy approach of ‘importing’ players from every part of the world for all competitions, including clubless professionals, without any intention to develop local footballers. Every invitation to the national team features the same tired legs, including those struggling to tie down regular shirts on the bench in their clubs, while the home-based players, who might be better prepared and obviously hungry for fame, never made the list.
Nigerian-based players are aware that the national coaches are not interested in developing local talent, as they never attend league matches in the country to scout for new players. Most of these players are plotting how to escape to Iran, Malta, Hungary, and some obscure leagues outside Nigeria while taking corner kicks or battling opponents on the fields of play. The truth is that managers who are not interested in developing Nigerian league players cannot succeed in taking Nigerian football to a higher level. Unfortunately, this is where Chelle falls. I will deliberately avoid talking about the coach’s technical capacity or lack of it because this piece is not about the coach alone but about our defective system.
Those who witnessed the golden era of Nigerian football can testify to the fact that the nation had thriving age-grade competitions, from the Ramat U-13 Cup to the Youth Sports Federation of Nigeria competitions, to Pepsi Academy and the Principal’s Cup, among others. Henry Nwosu, a member of the Green Eagles that won Nigeria’s first African Cup of Nations on home soil in 1980, was a product of the Principal’s Cup, being a student at St. Finbarr’s College, Lagos, then. Mikel Obi, a former Super Eagles midfielder, emerged from the Pepsi Academy, Jos. The bulk of Nigeria’s U-20 players from 1983 to the 90s were produced by these age-grade programmes. The Nigerian players, who won the maiden edition of the FIFA/Kodak U-16 World Championship in China, were products of the Principal’s Cup and youth academies in the country.
These developmental competitions have not only disappeared, but Nigeria, in the recent past, resorted to inviting foreign-based ‘professionals’ to play qualifiers for CAF/FIFA U-20 tournaments against countries fielding largely their local players. Sadly, we didn’t know (or we pretended not to know) that the day of reckoning was at hand.
Who starts climbing a tree from the leaves? Who starts building a house from the roof? This is exactly what we are currently trying to do with our football. It can’t work. We need to go back to the basics; start rebuilding the foundations of developmental structures we have watched collapse in our football house.
This is why I refuse to share in a blind optimism that the Super Eagles will win the current AFCON or qualify for the 2030 World Cup (on the field of play?), as I will be building a beautiful imaginary structure on a clearly faulty foundation.
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