Nigerians had little sympathy for their national soccer team on Thursday, saying their two-year withdrawal from international competition was well-deserved punishment for their embarrassing showing at the World Cup.
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathan on Wednesday disbanded the national team, who were knocked out at the group stage after failing to win a match in South Africa, suspended the soccer federation and withdrew Nigeria from international competitions for two years to allow for a rebuilding process.
“It is a good thing that the government came out to intervene in football,” said Benjamin Chidebere, a civil servant in the commercial capital, Lagos.
“Football unites all Nigerians. If you a Yoruba man, a Hausa man, an Ibo man, football makes us drink together,” he added, referring to some of the country’s more than 250 ethnic groups.
Some in Africa’s most populous nation, where five decades of oil production have enriched an elite while the majority live on US$2 or less a day, said soccer was not the only area where Nigeria needed to tear down everything and start again.
“There’s a bigger issue underlying this. Nigeria should go back to the basics in everything, like the kind of schools we build. There’s a general laxity about everything,” 54-year-old musician Duro Ikujenyo said.
Nigeria’s lower house of parliament took a different view, however. It passed a motion urging Jonathan to rescind the ban and instead allow a parliamentary committee to investigate the problem behind the poor performance of the Super Eagles.
“This is the most stupid directive I’ve heard,” said one team fan, pointing out it could lead to an even longer ban as happened under former military ruler Sani Abacha.
Nigeria were banned by the Confederation of African Football (CAF) in 1996 when Abacha withdrew the team from the Africa Cup of Nations finals because he had been criticized by Nelson Mandela over the judicial execution of political opponents.
They could not compete in African competition for two years.
Newspaper editorials and soccer fans attributed part of the team’s failure to endemic corruption.
“It is good that the aged and tired team has been disbanded, but the government should immediately go further to fight the monsters of greed and graft in the football administration, which are at the heart of the poor performance at global competitions,” the Punch newspaper said in an editorial.
Jonathan has ordered the accounts of the World Cup organizing committee to be audited and any officials found responsible of wrongdoing to be punished.
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