- The Nigeria Football Federation has questioned the election that brought in Edema Fuludu as the Chairman of the Delta State Football Association.
The Nigeria Football Federation has questioned the election that brought in Edema Fuludu as the Chairman of the Delta State Football Association.
In a statement issued by the media department of the NFF, Chairman of Chairmen of Nigerian Football, Ibrahim Gusau, said the NFF resorted to appointing a Normalisation Committee to run the affairs of the Delta State FA following the crisis in the state football body.
According to Gusau, the Delta FA board suspended Fuludu as the acting chairman of the FA because the board’s tenure expired five months ago, without any solution to the crisis.
“Early last year, the board of the Delta State FA wrote a petition against the acting Chairman on various allegations, and eventually held a congress where the members suspended the acting chairman (Edema Fuludu). The NFF took note of the decision because process adopted complied with the laid down regulations for such to happen.
“We gave them ample time to fully resolve the crisis and conduct fresh elections in full adherence to the guidelines provided by the NFF Statutes and the electoral code. But they could not,” Gusau said.
He said the FA went ahead to conduct an election which brought Fuludu in as chairman, contravening the guidelines provided by the NFF Statutes and the electoral code.
The Chairman of Zamfara State FA also faulted the stand taken by the chairmen of the South-South zone, who called the normalisation committee of the NFF illegal.
According to him, they failed to address the issue surrounding the Delta problem.
“The term of the board of which Mr. Augustine Okocha was chairman, and which later appointed Mr. Edema Fuludu as acting Chairman, expired more than five months ago, without the quagmire being conclusively resolved.
“We were later informed that elections were conducted and a board had emerged. There was no way elections could have been conducted in such miasma of crisis. The so-called elections did not follow the guidelines and the NFF cannot allow such to stand.
“Delta FA is an affiliate of the NFF. Our position is that it is the football stakeholders in Delta State, and particularly those who are eligible to vote in the FA elections, who will elect people into the Delta State Football Association, not the entire stakeholders in the South-South zone,” he added.
Fuludu had maintained his stand that the election which brought him into office followed all due process.
He said the move by the NFF was a ploy to stampede a “legitimately elected board out of office and install a new board.”
The former Super Eagles midfielder, a 1994 AFCON winner, accused the NFF of trying to force him to step down so that another person could become chairman, calling it a “tyrannical and arm-twisting method.”
