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Don’t play the man, play the ball please

Home National Don’t play the man, play the ball please

So, the serial merry-go-round that has become a “not so juicy precursor” to the country’s topflight football league, the MTC Namibia Premiership (NPL), is back at full throttle?

Just as the charismatic NPL chairman Patrick Kauta promised a much better performance and improvements to the elite league’s modus operandi going forward – here comes another stumbling block. As per its designated mandate and rightly so, the league has issued league fixtures with an unusual number of 13 teams to do battle instead of the permitted 16 teams.

With the league having already pronounced its stance on the issue of relegation, the Interim Committee of the Namibia Football Association (NFA) Normalisation Committee (NC) for some strange reason resolved to seek clarity from the world football governing body Fifa over the issue of relegation and promotion. 

Up to this day, details in the letter drafted to Fifa remain sketchy as Fifa sanctioned the request to abolish the relegation and promotion of teams from the lower division. The bone of contention prevailing in the corridors of domestic football is the serial misinterpretation of justice and basic compliance. 

Rules are deliberately misinterpreted to suit personal agendas. The mere fact that there were no league activities in the national first divisions is surely not a valid excuse to cheese off relegation. That’s surely not the business of the NPL; as a sovereign organ, NPL cannot be dictated to by the mother body on how to run their business just because of failures by other organs within the organisation to run their leagues.
The buck also stops with the clubs – some of the so-called big guns are represented by blokes with sinister motives. These ambitious vultures masquerading as football officials are the biggest culprits, backstabbers, betrayers, enemies of progress. How do you gang up against an organisation you have pledged an oath to defend?

Letters of discontent are now being circulated with accusations and counter-accusations of maladministration within the top echelons of the NPL – ranging from irregularities in the awarding of tenders, etc.

 Companions in guilt move
What really boggles the mind is: why wait until things boil up before exposing such unbecoming practices? The fact that you were fully aware of such unscrupulous manouverings and kept yourself tightlipped equally makes you an accomplice and you should partly also shoulder some of the blame. 
This reminds me of somebody who gets caught driving through a red robot only to claim that everybody does it; you can’t debate the law, wrong is wrong, if the law says you must have a driving licence you ought to have one, the only reasonable argument is how to obtain it.

As yours truly inks this piece, I’m told some disgruntled football officials are ready to spill the beans about some unpleasant behind-the-scene goings-on within the NPL office. This leaves us with the old-fashioned biblical philosophy of “an eye for an eye, and tooth for a tooth”, which ultimately leaves everybody blind. I rest my case.