LEGAL EXPERIMENTATION AT THE NIGERIA-ARGENTINA MATCH

Law and rights at a football matter

I am a journalist. I was not a member of any of the feuding football factions of NFA nor NFF. So, a body to which you are not a member ordinarily have no power to discipline you. This calls to question where Alhaji Aminu Maigari’s board of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) has gotten the powers to purportedly, as announced by media organisations, which I also doubt, since no official letter to that effect has been handed to me on that ignoble decision, to ban me for life from all matters of football in the country.

To date, that decision has remained a rumour. If it were not, there was no formal relationship delivering such a decision to me. Therefore, it is not yet of effect. For that reason, I will be attending the match between Nigeria and Argentina. I wait to be stopped from performing my constitutional duty as a journalist.

Until that is done, I won’t have a room for injuries and thus, demand for such injuries to be paid for. I am also prepared to pay to buy a ticket at N2, 500:00, in the event where I am so stopped, and if again, I am so stopped, then, the injuries would have been enormous enough for me to go to a court of law to test the waters.

I had reported this to my local chapter of the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) since the primary function I belong to as a member, the Sports Writers Association of Nigeria (SWAN) both at the FCT and national levels, have not seen anything wrong with the decision of the NFF.

I also do know that, if this ignoble decision is allowed to go unchallenged, some days to come, the NFF or any other sports federation who feels any journalist is too critical of their activities will also slam a life ban on members of the fourth realm of the Estate.

Thank God there are judgments even of the Supreme Court of Nigeria that ruled that even the National Assembly or any such institutions do not have the powers to summon a journalist for their reports. So one wonders where did the NFF get their alien powers from. This we have to test today.