Senate to clip NFF president’s wings (Clip yours afterwards)

Posted by admin Legislature, Senate Friday, May 24th, 2013

Stakeholders in the nation’s football business have been told not to expect a dispensation where the president of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) will be an all-powerful individual as drafted in a proposed bill.

According to Senator Heineken Lokpobiri, a member of the Senate Committee on Sports, the current proposition where the president has the power to recommend the sack or otherwise of the General Secretary of the NFF is directly antithetical to the spirit of good administration.

The senator was speaking at a one-day public hearing by the Senate Committee on Sports on the bill for an Act to repeal the Nigeria Football Association Act Cap 110 Law of Nigeria 2004 to the new Act as it relates to the NFF.

He put issues in perspective when he posited: “One of the problems of the NFF is that of succession, if we must achieve anything in this amendment, we must situate critical areas like the appointment of the Secretary General and the issue of funding.”

“We don’t want to create empire for few individuals like what we had in the past,” he reasoned, while noting that the position of the General Secretary should survive the executive vagary of whoever is the president of the federation.

“A situation where the General Secretary can be fired by recommending to the board is not tidy enough; instead we should have a situation where he is either appointed or the General Assembly, made up of all FAs in the country, ratifies it.”

Lokpobiri said the new Act will be having internal mechanism to rein in the executive excesses of the helmsman. “We don’t want a situation where, like in the past, the fear of FIFA is always invoked at the slightest government check. You don’t expect government to give billions and keep quiet, all because of the issue of interference according to FIFA,” he said.

-Tribunewp_posts