Football as diversion: Time up!

Any government in Brazil that does not take football seriously cannot last 24 hours.
That was Chief Lekan Salami, the late football icon and former Chairman of the Ibadan-based
IICC Shooting Stars FC giving what, in todays social media world, would have made a
compelling tweet, a hashtag that would have tended for years. He was making a case, in the late
70s/early 80s, for greater commitment on the part of government to the game of football. His
position simply highlighted the sanctity of the position of primacy football occupied in the
Samba nation of Brazil.
Though not the birthplace of the beautiful game, the land of Carnival Fantastico, over the
decades, emerged as its spiritual capital, virtually propelling the rest of the world into associating
the country only with football and nothing else. Like the drunkard would brag to justify the
unbroken company of his bottles of alcohol, football rocked the Brazilian into stupor to forget his
sorrow. To take the very life of the Brazilian, give him football!
But how times have changed! Then it was give us the World Cup or we die. Now, the
placards read we dont need the World Cup. Then, it was we need money for football, football
and football. Now, the aluta chorus is we need money for hospital and education. Then, it was
FIFA, please make Brazil home. Now, the popular cry of death-daring protesters on the streets
of Brasilia, Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre, Belo Horizonte, Curitiba, Mendoza, Fortaleza, Salvador and
Recife is FIFA, go home!
Time up! The game which the worlds most powerful nation brands as soccer no longer wears
the diversionary charm of inducing the giants of South America to forget their problems life-
threatening problems similar to what obtains in the land of their brothers and sisters across the
Atlantic, the Giant of Africa. Brazilians are now much more concerned about poverty, inflation,
unemployment, insecurity, monumental government corruption, attendant dearth of health,
educational and transportation facilities and infrastructure and many more.
President Dilma Rousseffs government has been rocked with jeers and violent protests to its
very foundation. The million-man marches have not been to earnestly yearn for Dilma, but to
register the peoples outrage over a 2014 football World Cup hosting at a whopping cost of
$11.7b at a time when the lot, tears and sorrows of the ordinary Brazilian are graduating from
difficult to unbearable. Remarkably, a big supporter of the millions has been the legend, three-
time World Cup winner and Brazilian football icon himself; Edson Arantes do Nascimento, Pele.
An update tweet has just been generated on the streets of Rio de Janeiro, venue of the +20 Earth
Summit exactly two years ago: There has indeed been climate change; now, any government in
Brazil that takes football too seriously may not last 24 hours!
That update apparently has yet to hit the newsfeed page of Reno Omokri, who, despite being
Nigerian President Goodluck Jonathans Special Assistant on New Media, still lives in the world
of the old media. His act of chest-beating, in doing his job, listing the African Cup of Nations
trophy which the Super Eagles won in 2013 as a great achievement of the President in the last
three years showed he has failed to use his position to prepare the ground for the localization of
the lessons of the Brazilian experience. What a mean offside positional play within the prevailing
socio-political circumstances in the country.
The current state of the nation does not appear as one which the diversionary power of
football could sustain for much longer. As I wrote in my Football as scapegoat of March,
2012, any people that parades football as the only thing that binds them together cannot
genuinely lay claim to being a nation. The pervading problems of insecurity, poverty,
unemployment, high-profile corruption and retarded development are, as has been espoused by
national and international political commentators, direct consequences of the precarious socio-
economic circumstances and non-working political structure of the country.
This is why the political and national development vocabulary of the land are, as a newspaper
columnist put it, all about sharing and allocation. It is why a section of the country would
threaten the rest with violence, another would harass with our God-given natural resources and
yet another would seek to intimidate others with our numerical strength. No nation anywhere
in the world develops within such circumstances.
The geographical entity called Nigeria is like the typical Nigerian polygamous family.
Lackadaisical attitude, wastefulness, greed, intrigue, deceit and mutual suspicion are the most
prevalent scenarios where the ego-massaging father solely reserves the power to run the affairs
of the family. But the developmental and socio-economic fortunes of each tree-root thrive
better under the zonal management of the mother to the overall glory of the family as a larger
unit.
Like God-sent messiahs, always set apart for specific special missions, President Jonathan
emerged on the scene in such dramatic fashion not so he could rally to lead his party to victory
and make it rule for 60 years, but so he could play a Frederik de Klerk or a Mikhail Gorbachev
to restructure Nigeria. The call, among others, by Chief Emeka Anyaoku, the countrys revered
international diplomat who had ruled the Commonwealth of 53 nations, for a return to
regionalism, defines the special mission. Let Nigeria adopt the typical polygamous family
formula so each region or zone generates real development to the overall glory of the family
name, Nigeria. No sincere group with such endowments in factors of development as God-
given resources or numerical strength should be afraid of this.
The era of deploying football to divert attention has landed in the dustbin of history. Football
itself, as evident in more sophisticated systems, flourish better in nations waxing strong in
political stability, socio-economic prosperity, infrastructural efficiency and general security. It is
only when this is admitted and made to count that we can, in the long run, stave off the Brazilian
experience. It is only then, even as the Transformation Ambassadors of Nigeria (TAN) and their
likes are manipulating the on-going 2014 World Cup festival to canvass for Goodluck, that any
good luck could continue.