Confederation of African Football (CAF) Secretary-General (SG) Veron Mosengo-Omba says the International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) Normalisation Committee (NC) did ‘what it could’ under the circumstances, when it was appointed to run the affairs of the Namibia Football Association (NFA) in 2019.
This was after squabbles had emerged amongst the NFA Executive Committee (Exco) members, the then president Frans Mbidi and secretary-general Barry Rukoro, rendering the association ungovernable, forcing FIFA to intervene.
Mosengo-Omba said FIFA was satisfied with the work of the NC, even though more could have been done to avoid conflict which has engulfed the current NFA Exco elected into office on 22 February 2020, with Ranga Haikali winning the presidency under the banner of the so-called ‘progressive forces’.
However, within a year of assuming office, things have turned sour with accusations flying of mismanagement, corruption and many other vices by various members of the Exco and the NFA SG Franco Cosmos.
It led to the suspension of Haikali as president leading to the visit by the CAF SG on a fact-finding mission.
Addressing journalists in Windhoek on Tuesday after meeting football stakeholders, Mosengo-Omba said the NC did a satisfactory job as per mandate by FIFA, to run the NFA’s daily affairs, ensure that the members of the NFA whose executive committees are out of the mandate, organise and conduct the relevant elections; and once elections have been held at the member level, to organise and conduct elections of a new NFA Exco.
The NC was also to act as an electoral committee with none of its members eligible for any of the open positions in the elections.
“We should have given them also the mandate to revisit the statutes. But maybe that was a mistake on our side, we said do not take care of the statutes (NFA constitution) because of lack of time. We also believed that people would understand these statutes, but we discovered now that everybody interpreted them according to their interests,” he said.
Mosengo-Omba said the interpretation of the statutes is the one that created the general conflict, however noted that this is not the original cause of the current mayhem in Namibian football.
Source: The Namibian Press Agency
