The current situation at the NFA

BARRY RUKOROThe year 2019 was a one of much political upheaval in Namibian football. We saw the removal of a leadership in the best example of what America and their English side-chicks across the pond did in Iraq and Libya.The evil of regime change was disguised under the lie of corruption and nepotism. The good, maybe not the excellent, was replaced by the bad and the cruel, and football was caught in the same quagmire that both Iraq and Libya have found themselves in for the last twenty-odd years. Namibian football became yet another statistic on the list of failed attempts at regime change.In the process of doing so, the evil that continues to bedevil our game, the so-called Progressive Forces (PF), gained unlimited powers through total disregard of the laws that govern our football, disrespect for the right to be heard and the use or rather the abuse of all tools at their disposal to achieve a sinful victory in the battle for the soul of football.I am not going to dwell on the historical facts of 2019 and the battle between the NFA and NPL but would rather focus my energy on the current situation. The failure of the Namibia Sport Commission, the courts and the media to protect the game from abuse is well recorded and does not need any further explanation. I will as much as possible illuminate the dark corners currently being occupied by the so-called Progressive Forces in their attempts to cling onto power. I will further put some light on the route that I think football will travel going forward. I am doing so thinking that we have travelled the longer part of this unfortunate journey and that the end of the nightmare is near and that soon football will be back to normal. We have sunk as deep as we can possibly go down and now the only way left for any kind of movement is up, leaving the PF and its ill-conceived intentions in the pit.Having survived, unfortunately so, numerous court challenges and appeals to the Namibia Sport Commission (NSC) instituted by the NPL, the NFA, as directed by the PF, got very arrogant and now takes all stakeholders in football for granted, including the sponsors and the government. They do not care what the statutes and all other legal instruments of NFA and football say and do what they want, even if that is contrary to the very same laws they are supposed to protect and observe.They have even gone as far as unilaterally changing the written text of the statutes of NFA to accommodate their own aspirations and to protect themselves against possible future prosecutions. To hide this mammoth sin, the first vice-president, instead of the president, co-signed the purported statutes with the secretary-general before it was sent to FIFA. Nowhere does the statutes of the NFA permit the first vice-president to do anything of his own accord and without instruction from the president while the president is alive and well. The drafters of our statutes expected the first vice-president to only act with the express permission of and instruction from the president and only in a case where the president is unable to perform his duties.Hardap, a member of the NFA, requested an extraordinary congress of the association to dismiss an elected executive committee. In doing so they based their request on the provisions of Article 37.1. That article reads as follows:“The Congress may dismiss a person or a body. The Executive Committee may place the dismissal of a person or body on the agenda of the Congress. The Executive Committee may also dismiss a person or body provisionally. Any Executive Committee member may submit a proposal to place such a motion for dismissal on the agenda of the Executive Committee or Congress”.It is clear from the above that this article does not empower a member of the NFA, such as Hardap or Omaheke for that matter, to institute dismissal proceedings against the executive committee. In fact, none of the legal instruments of the NFA does that and any such act is a clear violation of those documents as such powers are only reserved for the executive committee and the individual members thereof. How the secretary-general got to advise the executive committee to accede to such a fraudulent request is beyond believe.We should not forget that in addition to that the decision to host that extraordinary congress was taken in total disregard of the elected president of the NFA and that any such meeting called and convened by anybody else than the president is an illegal event.What further baffles my mind regarding this matter is why those executive committee members who remained on the PF side of the divide, and obviously supported the idea of their own dismissal, did not bring such a proposal forward. I am sure that the future will educate us more about this strange position they took by refusing to use the power given to them by Article 37.1 to arrive at their desired end and instead chose to do so through an illegal means. Whether it was ignorance or just arrogance only the future will tell. We thanked CAF and FIFA for having stopped the hosting of that illegal extraordinary congress, but the desperation of the PF and NFA knows no bounds as in the presence of the CAF and FIFA directive to postpone the extraordinary congress they now devised a new low when Otjozondjupa was directed to submit a new request, only this time under the even more unconstitutional guise of a vote of no confidence. On 4 November 2021 Otjozondjupa did just that, citing Article 28 of the statutes. That article only specifies the agenda of the congress and all points are still to be proposed by the relevant bodies and entities as empowered elsewhere in the statutes. It is important to re-emphasise that such powers are only reserved for the executive committee and the individual members of that body. Furthermore, nowhere does this particular article speak to a vote of no confidence. This is a clear example of how far the NFA and the PF are prepared to go to rape the legal instruments of the NFA.That illegal motion has now come to pass and the NFA congress took the un-presented, ill-informed and unconstitutional step of dismissing the executive committee on the recommendation of a member. That step is unsustainable and if anything, FIFA will not recognise it and the decisions of that congress will be of no effect. However, it has for now, left the NFA without executive powers.Catch Part 2 in tomorrow’s edition.

The current situation at the NFA

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Namibian Sun 2025-08-01

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The current situation at the NFA

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Namibian Sun 2025-08-01

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