…To Officiate In CAF, FIFA Competitions
Popular football presenter, Chisom Mbonu-Ezeoke has said that Nigerian referees will always find it difficult to officiate any CAF or FIFA Competition, due to the incompetency in the association.
The veteran analyst said this in a chat with City People on why the association should come back, take stock, and say deliberately how to make its organisation a better one.
Ezeoke, who is a CAF Women’s Football Committee member, and the first female FIFA football licensed agent in Nigeria, is paving the way for women to invest in promoting female football and also to have a return on investment in the world of sport for women.
She revealed how in those good old days she enjoyed watching football with her elder brothers and as a result of that, her passion for the game developed further as she grew older.
This encouraged her to venture into Sports Journalism where she went on to become the first female football analyst for SuperSport Nigeria – a network she grew up watching and dreamt of working for.
In a chat with, City People, she revealed the reasons behind the snubs of the nation’s referees, and that the people in CAF see these referees as corrupt.
She said: “Of course If you are smelling go and bath. If you’re stinking, go take a shower. It is what it is. “We see it every single week. We laugh about it here, we joke about it, but it affects us in the bigger picture. And you know what it does It’s like cheating in the exams.
“When you cheat in the exams, what happens? You don’t study anymore, because in your head why study when you can cheat? So when you keep incompetent referees and when the referee’s incompetence gets rewarded instead of getting punished because all those who suspend them for a few games is like a slap on the arm. When you keep doing that, why does the referee waste his time or her time? How can they get better? It’s not possible.
“So we must hold ourselves to very high standards if we want to be treated with the same respect because CAF is not going to be or FIFA is not going to bring anybody who is going to come there and create controversy? They don’t want that, they want to avoid it all the time. Okay and if CAF is not appointing you, how can FIFA appoint you? CAF recommends CAF will recommend and we see what is happening, we see them at the African Champions League, ACL at the African Confederation Cup, CCC, we see that African Nations Championship, CHAN, we see it at the U17, U20s, all the age grade tournaments, and then we see it in the league.
“Now when we have these things happening, now we have phones people just use their phones to do it and then post every single week. We’ve seen it and please I think we must start telling ourselves the truth in Nigeria, what we see with referees is a sham, it’s a disgrace and we need to stop it,” she said.
According to her, the good ones among them are now seen as bad because of the number of corrupt or bad ones. “Now It’s unfortunate that we have a few good referees who are being tainted, some good referees who are being tainted by those who are corrupt. If we see it every single week, every single week in the Nigeria Professional Football League, NPFL something comes out, there’s a video. Every single week I receive something; Chisom look at this, is this what…all blatant. There are mistakes and they are purely evil and blatant calls.
“So what do you think is going to happen? Like I said, if you’re smelling go and take a shower, we are smelling we need to bath, we need to go and take a bath, and then, until we stop it, what is happening is still going to happen to us, even more. Which tournament was it that was in Nigeria? We didn’t even have a referee, a Nigerian referee.
“We didn’t even have a Nigerian referee. In Nigeria, you have referees from Sudan and Rwanda.
“The 4th edition of the Women’s Champions League that will start in a few days, do you know we don’t have one?
“None from Nigeria. Are we not ashamed of ourselves? See when we are ready, when we begin to feel shame, we will change things. Hopefully, we will get there. I keep praying for better leadership and that is why eventually, I’m thinking of also going into administration because like I keep saying I can’t be out here constantly criticizing without being in.
“So if I want to effect change I have to go in there, whether I’m allowed, whether I’m pushed out, but I must. I have to give it a shot. Like I said, we’re smelling so let’s go and bath. FIFA CAF, they’re not going to invite us for none to come and embarrass the brand, African football, or World football. So we must tell ourselves the truth, we must start by speaking the truth. We see it every single week, poor poor calls. I saw one recently the Kano Pillars Vs Rangers International, two blatant penalties. One was even possibly a red card and went in with two legs. C’mon, once he was hacked inside the box,” Mrs Mbonu-Ezeoke said.
She concluded by saying that the videos of all the wrong calls from the referees are out in the open for all to see and we should cut down the number of our referees because it’s of no use having more of them with the same calls. “Of course, the world will be seeing and saying, what a scene. So I think at the end of the day, I find it very embarrassing. Like I said, we have tournaments in Nigeria, we don’t even have Nigerian referees in it. How, how and then I’m wondering what the Nigerian Referees Association, NRA is doing when this constantly happens? Is it not time to come back, take stock and say, okay, how do we change this? How do we build our referees? There must be zero tolerance.
“By the way, we have too many referees. We need to whittle it down, and create a pool of professionals, a few of them to run at the highest level, the rest at the grassroots level, that’s a different thing. But at the highest level, we must have a pool, a few you can’t have 90-something referees, for what? Or 70-something, what are we doing with 70-something referees for the NPFL, how many games do we have? That’s what I think,” the veteran analyst said.
Chisom Mbonu-Ezeoke also believes that women should invest more in female football.
Ezeoke, the first female FIFA football licensed agent in Nigeria, is paving the way for women to invest in promoting female football and to receive a return on investment in the world of sport.
In 2017, Ezeoke was one of the recipients of the Global Sports Mentoring Program and went on to be picked from her class to mentor the 2018 Class of the GSMP in Washington DC.
The BA. Hons. in English Language graduate is the co-founder of the Fortem Inspire program – a project that uses sport as a tool to promote education, leadership skills, and a healthy lifestyle for young girls and women in general.
Speaking with City People, Ezeoke also revealed why Women should invest more in female football and administration at large.
Hear her: “First of all, let me say that as much as we want more, I have to acknowledge the giant strides we’ve made in women in sports. So if you go now, I think 2 women and the Nigerian Football Federation, NFF, Margaret Icheen is there, Aisha Falode is there and if you add Nkechi Obi, who is coming by being the Chairman of the Nigerian Women’s Football League, NWFL okay, so you have 3 women, two voted in so we’ve had a lot of strides that have been made. But I think that sometimes women understand the challenges of women better just like men understand the challenges of men better that’s not to say that men cannot contribute to the women’s sport or women cannot contribute to the men’s sport I don’t think so, but what we’re now saying is that when men have a lot of representation okay, so we need more representation of women.
So if I were in the NFF Executive, a lot of things, no matter what or whatever agenda that we discussed, they must have an agenda for women’s football that I would make sure comes in there. And I think when I joined the Confederation of African Football, CAF Women’s Committee when we had all these priority recommendations and we developed all these strategies and stuff we were 100% women in the committee and we fought hard, very hard to get the attention. And it’s not like the men don’t want to give you the attention, but there are so many things for them to discuss that they end up glossing over a lot of them. But if you have women in there, they will push for it and they get more, because everybody is pushing their agenda and it’s human nature, everybody’s self-preserving.
So I’m more worried about myself, my own and the next person, it doesn’t make me a bad person it’s just a way of life, that’s why on the plane they will tell you before you put a mask on another person, make sure you put your own first because you must self-preserve before you can preserve the others.
So I think it’s really important that we have women in the room and like I said being in a few rooms now has also made me understand the importance of that, so I say to people, you cannot affect change from the outside, you can only affect change when you are in the room and you have a seat at the table.
So you can be an armchair critic and criticize and criticize and criticize and criticize, if you’re not in there, you can never affect change. You can only criticize and if you criticize a deaf man, he doesn’t even hear you at the end of the day, so that’s why even in politics, in governance, whatever, the people who are there if they are bad leaders, the economy will be bad, the government and the society will be bad because a bad leader does not understand. So you criticising the bad leader with all your ideas, why are you not in there? You can only change what those bad leaders are doing if you’re inside there, so I think it’s very important that we have women’s representation”.
“I like what I’m seeing in a place like Rwanda, where the push was to have 50-50 representation in government and it’s happening because people advocate for their own. It’s again, human nature. People advocate for their gender, people advocate for their tribe, people advocate for their school, for their religion, for your office, you advocate for your office”.
“So if you’re in City People, you’re not going to first advocate for other journals. So that’s why we need more representation, It’s very important. And I’m saying to the Women, when we get there, we must understand the weight we are carrying, the responsibility we are carrying because whatever we do there affects, has a ripple effect that can either take us 10 years forward or 20 years backward, so we must take that with a huge sense of responsibility, a very huge sense of responsibility, I must add”.
-Benprince Ezeh
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