What Football Teaches Us About Leadership 2 - 10-07-2018

The world cup season makes us begin to think about sports and how sports are such a unifying factor. When Nigeria does well everybody is happy. You hug your enemy without knowing. I was in Ghana a while ago, and all of Accra and indeed the whole of Ghana were in uproar over a scandal with the GFA, the body responsible for football. There were allegations of match fixing and the chairman had to step down, and the country was angry, why? Someone said ‘grown men have heart attacks over these matches, not knowing they were already fixed, and there was no point praying or yelling. What point is it when the match is already thrown and fixed? Football is major, sports is major, it does not change lives, doesn’t solve world peace issues, or curb world poverty, then what does it do for us? It makes us all feel patriotic, it makes us all root for the same thing. They make you proud to belong to the same nation that these ones that are doing so well belong to. Football makes us proud. Our leaders should make us proud. We should not be proud of them regardless of whatever they do, they should do things that would make us proud the way we are also proud of our footballers. There are so many lessons to be learnt from football that unifies all of us. The problem with Nigeria is not that we are not united; it is these things that divide us. The fact that we believe deep within us, that the path to leadership is not fair, that not the best get into leadership. That those who get into leadership sometimes do not deliver the results we expect. That they do not represent all of us and are not making us proud, therefore we don’t root for them. When we believe that the best of us have gone to represent Nigeria and they would make us proud, give us the results that we desire, by solving the problems of the nation, all of a sudden we would see that Nigerians are actually a united and not a divided people.