THE HARRISON JALLA PERSPECTIVE: NFF New Sponsorship Deals Translate To Nothing
Last week, the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) entered into partnership with Telecommunications giant MTN and a leading brand in the Nigeria aviation industry, AIR PEACE, in Lagos.
The deals like several others run into several hundreds of millions of Naira for three years.
The NFF through President Amaju Pinnick also confirmed that other streams of sponsorship deals from different brands are on their way to the NFF coffers shortly.
Unfortunately, these deals and the expected deals lined up for the NFF will translate to nothing and will definitely add no value to Nigeria Football due to entrenched corruption, massive looting, lack of accountability and transparency.
The problem with Nigeria Football under Pinnick has nothing to do with sponsorship or funding, he has that in abundance.
Despite the huge sponsorship funds at the disposal of Pinnick, he also has this uncanny method of hanging all the hosting of the national team games on the State Governors particularly in the South South.
And these games in which huge state resources are committed by the Governors have no accounting records as funds provided don’t go through the NFF accounts.
Alhaji Aminu Maigari, former NFF President and Amaju Pinnick’s predecessor in office, was never privy to all these huge resources. He worked with limited funds from the federation account and won 12 trophies in four years without owing a backlog of bonuses and allowance to any category of the national teams.
Therefore, there is nothing really to celebrate about the so-called new NFF sponsorship deals.
They will translate to nothing because the funds will be diverted as usual to private pockets.
And all the sermonising about self-funding is balderdash.
BY HARRISON JALLA
