By Prof Emmanuel Ojeme

FIFA  recently has been in the news concerning the 2018 and 2022 World Cup bids and hosting hustlers. Ordinarily, football is a crowd-puller, the world over.

And, the attention the ruling or governing body draws to itself reaches the peak when it is about the World Cup. Although FIFA is a voluntary agency, it has become a very powerful organisation because of the services it renders to the world as well as its centrifugal statutes.The issue of interest today revolves around the desire of countries to clinch the 2018 and 2022 hosting rights of the World Cup.

The bidders had adopted orthodox and unorthodox means to win the support of FIFA executive committee members. This included the use of ‘lobbyists’ who are hydrated and double-edged agents. This has caught up with the FIFA system and some targeted officers of this organisation are in the dock. Let me say that FIFA may not clean its image just by peeling off its parts. This paper recommends a holistic organisational reform approach that rebuilds confidence in a solid and consolidating manner.

What does this mean and why is it necessary? Organisational restructuring and overhauling is different from segmented or pigeon-holed punishment. There is a huge suspicion of underhand deals in the FIFA system. FIFA itself has not found out how to deal with it or prevent its occurrence. An undercover agent, who operates pretentiously is a dubious instrument in itself and hence unreliable. What will help FIFA clean its house is an in-built systematic house- keeping methods that also include more operational openness, democratisation of voting methods that may have to include allocation of votes to its affiliated federations.

In dealing with its members who seem to be land mined by anti-FIFA undercover agents, it is advisable for FIFA to dismiss the information as unusable. Or were these agents working for FIFA? Does FIFA hate some of its members? I am pleading for justice to be tempered with mercy.

I am concerned because FIFA should not play to the gallery. Remediating and reformative measure can achieve the goal of reform in the organisation. Amputative measures will lead to more and more amputations and at the end of these amputations, will there still be FIFA? Let the offenders, if any, apologise openly and be allowed to learn from their errors. This is my memo to FIFA.