There is a certain group of our
Naija countrymen who automatically switch on to hibernation mode whenever our
national football team plays. Most of them insist that they have very weak
hearts that cannot withstand the rigour and tension that soaks anyone foolish
enough to invest interest in a team as unpredictable as Nigeria’s senior
football team. If you have met anyone of them, they’ll readily support their
disrespect and disdain for the senior national team with a certain year when we
played the Roberto Baggio team. ‘We were nearly there…and so close to beating
the Italians but we messed things up at the very last minute’, one of these
pessimists groaned recently.
I was one of those pessimists
that I described up there until now. Rather than soar or sink with my country,
I’d take a walk, preferring to get someone tell me the outcome of any match
involving the Super Eagles (the result in many cases was usually the-nearly-there-Roberto-Baggio kind of
fiasco). So, in giving the impression that I was protecting my weak heart from
falling apart, I’d sometimes pretend to listen to the commentary on radio. But
the commentaries were not even much help. They push your blood pressure sky
high up the ceiling – when the ball is still far away from the
goalpost, the over-zealous commentator usually says, ‘Gooaaal…oh no, it went
over the bar!’
Formerly perennial pessimists of
our football like me established a nexus with our failures in football with our
way of doing things as a people and as a country. Most of us have never really believed that
football is the only thing that unites Nigerians. That belief (that football
does not unite Nigerians) has been predicated on the strong notion that for
there to be unity, certain emulsifying factors have to be in place. I cannot be
hard put to mention some of those emulsifying factors – things like a
commonality of language, faith, and a belief in the core values that propel the
positive things of life. The kind of ‘unity’ that football has often brought
lasts only 90 minutes, what a friend referred to as a truce among the plurality
of ethnic values and interests that play
out every day in Nigeria. Unity cannot be that temporal and full of tension
like football. Most of us non-believers in the football-is-the-only-thing-that-unites-Nigeria anthem had gone
ahead to propound another theory – a theory that insists that instead of
football, corruption in its grandness and profundity has been the greatest
thing that ‘unites’ an Ibo and Hausa, Hausa and Yoruba, and Ibo and Yoruba (I
use these words as synonyms for the various tribes in Nigeria). Corrupt people
have no tribe, and are always united by their intention and their avarice.
I pursued my disinterestedness in
the ‘unity of football’ with a campaign calling for a support for non-football
sports as another vehicle for national cohesion. It is still on ground. It is
an attempt to get corporate bodies, multinationals, individuals irrespective of
their ethnic or religious or political divide to do something to balance the
unusual attention that football gets as against all other sports, and through
which other nations shine and shine bright. We may be able to discuss this, and
be able to get better information if you get in touch with me on this.
In spite of this former
disrespect and former disdain for Nigerian football at the senior level,
certain things stand out today. One, our
football players have broken a 15-year hiatus and jinx and have gone ahead to re-establish
and stamp our dominance as football kings in the hearts of Africans. Two,
in the build up to the matches we played to get to the World Cup Finals, our
team surmounted incredible odds, skepticism and after we qualified to be in
Brazil, our team displayed a resolve that we were not just going to participate
but that we were going to go far. When I think about these, a well of pride
swells up in me that out of the 196 nations inhabiting our universe, we were
part of a doughty group used the instrumentality of our football to make
eloquent statements that in spite of certain seeming insurmountable odds, we
can and yes we can.
Our boys have done very well and
have been very good ambassadors. We didn’t win the World Cup but we surpassed
the results of England, Spain, Portugal, Australia, Switzerland and Greece. And
long after our brothers Cameroon, Ghana, and Ivory Coast were sent home, the
world continued to hear Nigeria, Nigeria, Nigeria and Nigeria in that splendid
match against Argentina. The lesson of
our participation in the World Cup finals in Brazil is the Nigerian example: that in spite of hatred leading to the taking
of innocent lives by terrorists, in spite of continued skepticism and an
avalanche of unfair and unconstructive criticism directed at the authorities who
have supported our boys, we can remain resolute and forge ahead as Nigeria.
I recommend that we should stop
here and semi-audibly mention the names of these boys and coaches
who used the platform of the World Cup to showcase the resolve and tenacity of
the Nigerian spirit: Keshi, Amokachi,
Enyema, Agbim, Ejide, Efe, Oboabona, Omeruo, Oshiniwa, Elderson, Egwuekwe,
Odunlami, Uchebo, Rueben, Obi, Yobo, Onazi, Azeez, Ameobi, Nwofor, Michael,
Odemwigie, Musa, Emenike, and Moses.
