Nigeria’s 2025 CHAN charade

Oke osisi darue ala, nwanyi a-ria ya elu. When the big tree falls, a woman can climb it. That, to me, best describes what befell Nigeria at the 8th African Nations Championship (CHAN) Football Tournament which ends today in Nairobi, Kenya. Nigeria, ranked by FIFA as the fifth best football-playing nation in the world in 1994, was recently beaten by four goals to nothing by a country at war: Sudan! That mauling by Sudan trumped the earlier disappointment of a lone-goal defeat by Senegal at our opening match of that tournament. It is a pointer to the fact that that the giant tree has fallen and has thus become a plaything for all kinds of people.

CHAN 2025 was such a huge disappointment. It was a charade, the face-saving two-nil beating of Congo in our last group game notwithstanding. There had been such football heartbreaks in Nigeria in the past. Some of us experienced and endured those heartbreaks. The memories are still alive but they have been faded by time. Meanwhile, I seriously urge football-loving Nigerians to start now to brace themselves up for the impact of the outcome of the decisive FIFA World Cup 2026 qualifying games involving Nigeria.

In 1987, as a secondary school boy in Umuahia, I experienced two of the most disappointing moments I could recall as a human being. The first occasion was captured in a news magazine cover story with a title reminiscent of the Montevideo plane crash of 1972: “The Crash in Chile.” It was a comprehensive report of that disheartening fail of our team to the World Youth Championship hosted by Chile in 1987. I believe it was Newswatch Magazine… That outing was so disappointing that some of us wept bitterly in the open when Italy ended our hopes of making it through to the group stages of that competition.

Our last group game on Sunday, 18 October 1987 was a really sad spectacle. I had high hopes just as millions of other Nigerians did. I strongly believed that Willy Opara, Etim Esin, Adeolu Adekola and their colleagues would fight back in the second half after conceding two quick goals in the first half against Italy. However, all I seemed to hear throughout that late Sunday night was a lone irritating Italian voice with a megaphone. It was chanting something like “eeeee oooo Italia!!!” non-stop. Seeing the inability of our magical Etim Esin, mercurial John Ene Okon, clinical Adeolu Adekola and co, tutored by Chris Udemezue, to conjure up something in that match was heartbreaking. That game against Italy sealed our fate because it was our last group game of the tournament. It was such a painful time for me. And I was about the only one in our compound in Umuahia who understood how much agony I had to bear!

The other disappointment was the final match of the Canada ‘87 World Under-16 Tournament. Nigeria played against Russia in the final and we lost that game via a penalty shootout. We saw the game in our house in Samonda, Ibadan and it was so painful that the boys that came to the house to see the game with me left one by one without even the usual exchange of pleasantries with my parents. Philip Osondu and co could not pull it off and it left us with such a painful memory that Sunday night.

 The third and fourth ones were more of serious heartbreaks than repairable disappointments – the death of Sam Okwaraji on August 12, 1989, and the Super Eagles’ loss to Italy in our Second Round game of the FIFA World Cup USA 1994. Both events are still painful, only that time has tempered the wounds these fundamental occasions left in my heart.

On 25 June, 2022, this column described the Nigerian football league(s) as being perpetually at infancy. In fact, the title of that column is NPFL: Nigerian Perpetually Fledgling League. More than three years after that opinion was expressed, nothing significant has changed in Nigerian local football, except that Amaju Pinnick is no longer at the helm of affairs in that aspect of our life as Nigerians. The second noticeable change is that the league is still fledgling, but can be said to have only learnt a better way to lift its wings. That appears to be what Gbenga Elegbeleye and his team in the Nigeria Premier League Board is trying to do with the Nigerian Professional Football League – the NPFL. There are consternations that, regardless of what Elegbeleye and co will do, the NPFL will remain fledgling because of that inexplicable ‘Nigerian factor’.

While we watch Gbenga Elegbeleye and his team with our fingers crossed, we should also not forget that the squad that went to CHAN 2025 was selected from the same NPFL. That squad was believed to be populated by the best legs that could be found in our domestic football league. But from what we saw at the tournament hosted by Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda, were those players the best we have in our domestic league? If they were, what went wrong with the team? Could it have been about coaching and player management? Fidelis Ilechukwu and Daniel Ogunmodede were doing a good job in that team before Eric Chelle was hired. The man Chelle came in, took charge, and led the team to Tanzania for CHAN 2025 and we came back from there thoroughly battered.

ALSO READ: Tinubu not pressuring me to do wrong thing — NNPC’s Ojulari

The Nigerian 2025 CHAN disaster was like a rain that fell when it was ripe. It fell after sufficient dugbe-dugbe had shaken in the sky. There were enough warnings by way of lightening, thunder and cloud. No rainmaker could stop it. It was a disaster waiting to happen. Part of the warnings is that in the last five years, no Nigerian clubside has performed considerably well in the Confederation of African Football (CAF) clubside competitions. Only two clubs, Enyimba and Rivers United are ranked in the CAF Top 50 in 2025. That can only be retrogression… We just push through and, like Fanny Amun once said, wobble and fumble till the eventual inevitability – a crash.

In sports, we have consistently been wobbling and fumbling. There are no measured plans, there are no proper projections; and there are no controls or defined frameworks. Sports in Nigeria, at both the federal and states levels, is at the top of those items the political leaders use to settle their ‘boys’. Appointments into sports administration are hardly ever based on merit, knowledge or experience. It is used like a crude tool in ploughing the political field – no science, no knowledge, no business or economic considerations. It is just ‘job for the boys’.

Otherwise, the Obafemi Awolowo Stadium in Ibadan, commonly referred to as ‘Liberty Stadium’ would not have been left to degenerate so much. The “Sports City” which is the defunct National Stadium in Lagos would not have become a distant memory and a sad relic. The MKO Abiola National Stadium in Abuja, built in 2003 mainly because of the All Africa Games the country hosted, would not have become a cattle ranch in under 25 years. Nigeria is the “giant of Africa” but we do not have a stadium that meets FIFA and CAF standards.

We say we are giants but countries with population less than a tenth of the country’s, beat us repeatedly in football games. Some say it is because those other countries are catching up but I say it is because we are stagnant. Just like the man being pursued by the masquerade, if they are moving should we not also be moving? If they are running to catch-up with us, should we wait for them to catch-up and then disgrace us? Picture a situation in which the Three Lions of England loses crucial football games to San Marino, Gibraltar or Faroe Islands…

That shameful outing of our Home-Based Eagles’ in Tanzania and Kenya is a pointer to our anyhowness as a country in very many things. In this case, we stay on sports where we have perfected the “fire-brigade approach”. That competition exposed us and showed that it is a sad metaphor for our declining fortunes in stature, structure, infrastructure and influence.