By Rev Fr Gerald Nwafor
This is not to exonerate Victor or vilify the veteran player Finidi George who was the coach of our national team that is now wobbling like Nigeria. One may ask a simple question that borders on the natural law of gravity.
If you are in a plane and there was turbulence and the whole aircraft is shaking, I don’t think one of the passengers would be saying “I don’t feel it.” It means the passenger has a problem, not the plane, because it was evident that the airplane is experiencing turbulence.
The whole of Nigeria is in a state of quagmire and everything in Nigeria is experiencing discordant tunes coming out from the public and the private sector. The government of Nigeria is heavily disconnected from the plight of the common man.
And the common man is searching for a means of survival by all means. That is why a petty journalist would report wrongly what the coach did and said to the public: to make money, and sell his newspaper, or have his social media handle awash with views and likes and shares. Fake news thrives now because people are desperate to make money and stay relevant.
Victor should not have gone online to rant and rave against Finidi because he later said that he called Finidi to excuse himself. That is to say, he has Finidi’s direct phone line. What stops him from calling him to ask him about the newspaper reporting that he did not want to play for Nigeria? That could have been a wise thing to do but he did not do it because of youthful exuberances and juvenile delinquencies. Victor is only 23 years of age.
I do not know too much about his educational background, but I know so much about his football artistry and mastery. He is a delight to watch when he is in top form. In the soccer world today, Victor has given Nigeria a place the way Finidi did some 30 years ago in Ajax. My worry now is that nobody is talking about the print media and the social media person(s) who propagated the false information that set this war of attrition among the Nigerian public against each other.
On the eve of the rant from Victor, the coach (Finidi) threw in the towel as the coach of the Nigerian national team because of many more issues that were not going according to plan in the national team, but that is not the purpose of the write-up. I am a Christian and I always find my line of thought following the champion of my religion.
In one of the teachings in the holy book, Jesus talked about the prodigal son. A story that has cut across religions, traditions, and cultures of the world. The prodigal son was welcomed back with a bang, but we may not get to that level.
The prodigal son was welcomed back because he was a son, and a son remains a son even if he misfired. He was welcomed back because he had the courage and the humility to come back. He was welcomed back because the father needed him to be back to have a complete household. On the issue of Victor, whom many Nigerians both local and international have condemned, we all agree that he did wrong, but we all agree that he is a great player.
We agree also that he is a Nigerian. We agree that someone wrote something about him on social media and the print media which was not true. Finally, we all want Nigeria to qualify for the 2026 FIFA World Cup in the USA, Canada, and Mexico. We cannot afford to be out of the World Cup in this era when FIFA has given Africa 10 slots. We should not be so distracted by the behavior of a 23-year-old that the World Cup would elude us.
Is it not the saying of our people that you beat the child with your right hand when he did something bad and at the same time use your left hand to bring the child closer to your heart for consolation? (Ewelu aka ekpe tie nwata ewelu aka nri gugua ya). We should put ourselves in Victor’s position: think of when we were 23 and how we managed the crises and challenges that confronted us at that youthful age, as the African footballer of the year 2023 has experienced. Meanwhile, the big elephant in the room is neither Victor nor Finidi but those people sitting in the NFF (Nigerian Football Federation) office in Abuja.In one of the Shakespearean books, Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony was quoted as saying in the funeral ceremony of Caesar, “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears; I come to bury Caesar, not to praise him; the evil that men do lives after them…” But I would say that we are not here to bury Victor or Praise Finidi but we are here to forgive Victor and move on with the national team and see how we can qualify for the World Cup. Who is the foreign coach the NFF is planning to hire? We do not know. What are the terms and conditions? We do not know.
Victor may not be right in his reactions, but NFF has never been a good father to the Nigerian players and coaches. When it was published that Victor was making inyanga for his national team one would expect a good father to come to the rescue of the son because the father knew that the son sustained injury in the last match with Lecce and would not allow the public to attack the son.
Till today NFF has not put out any official statement for Victor or Finidi. The interest of NFF is always what they would gain (legally or illegally). The next World Cup match will be on March 19th, 2025, against Zimbabwe in Nigeria. I hope by then NFF will have gotten their house in order and climb out of the ridiculous 5th position they found themselves in, with only three points out of the available twelve.
But remember my opening statement “Nigerian state is in a turbulence and do not expect calm inside the state, not even the football qualifiers, because Victor is not the cause.”
