Nigerian Corner: Let’s Pay Mozambique A Million Dollars To Beat Tunisia

Today, I write not as some objective, unbiased reporter, but as a die-hard Nigerian football fan.

Nigeria is the Giant of Africa, the most populous black nation in the world. A proud nation with over 250 tribes, customs and languages.

The discovery of oil in June 1956 was supposed to catapult our country to an era of prosperity. But rather than a boom, it has been doom for 140 million Nigerians; most of whom live on less than $2 a day.

But though our tongues may differ, football has been a great unifying factor. Yorubas, Hausas, Igbos, Muslims and Christians, men and women, the poor and the rich got together as one when we won our first Africa Cup of Nations in 1980 on home soil.

We celebrated as one big happy family when a bunch of unheralded youngsters made history in China in 1985 as the first African team to win a FIFA competition.

And when we again made another piece of African football history at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, it was again as one that we cheered our epic victory over Argentina that early August morning.

On Thursday the nations' team reached the final of the FIFA Under-17 World Cup, which we are hosting and also defending as champions, you would have thought that we had won the World Cup already.

The talk today is that Nigeria is a failed state. Nothing works. More and more companies are shutting down; the economy is almost grinding to a halt with an escalating rate of unemployment and insecurity everywhere.

Only recently, a giant banking scam was exposed, and we have all seen that for some of our super-rich compatriots, if you want to rob a bank, you only have to own one.

It is, therefore, not surprising that we love our football and also why we are a very religious people.

Both football and religion offer us hope. The national sport has been the ticket out of the gutter for hundreds of Nigerian homes. It is an escape, taking us away from our normal day worries, even if it is for just 90 minutes.

As long as you are alive, you cannot help but be hopeful. Hopeful that all your money worries will soon disappear, hopeful that the public power supply will be regular and not a luxury that it is now, hopeful that your children's education will not be disrupted for months on end by teacher strikes.

After all, a man without hope is a man with nothing.

The people's game in Nigeria has been in a comatosed state for a long time now. We crashed out of the 2002 World Cup, yet a section of media preferred to glorify this shame. And four years ago, we even missed the flight to the World Cup in Germany.

On Saturday, we will again be on the edges of our seats, but we will be praying for a miracle that the Super Eagles will qualify ahead of Tunisia for next year's World Cup.

There are even some among us who wish the contrary. Some believe that if we fail to again qualify for the World Cup, there will be a clean sweep of the NFF and more competent professionals will be brought in to salvage whatever is left of our game.

Some of these armchair critics, desperado's and hustlers pray for failure because they also want to get a piece of the action at the Glass House. In a country where unemployment is at an all-time high, it is not hard to see why some people wish to shoot down others so that they can take over.

I am against these people not because I believe in the NFF (they have just bungled the travel plans of the team to Kenya), but because, in a country of stolen votes and rights, failure only leads to more failures. The Glass House is only a sad reflection of the larger Nigerian society, a jungle where anything goes.

God forbid that we do not qualify for the 2010 World Cup, which will take place on African soil for the very first time ever.

I hold on to the hope of a miracle on Saturday, while also offering the idea that it would not be such a bad idea if we were to pay Mozambique to beat Tunisia for us. A handsome million dollar bonus would do just nicely. After all, the Presidential Task Force raised hundreds of millions to ensure World Cup qualification, and so the cash cannot be an issue.

And how else did the Ivory Coast go out of their way to thrash Mali for us to sneak into the quarter-finals of the 2008 Africa Cup of Nations in Ghana, when all seemed lost?

Samm Audu, Goal.com