Congress member reveals why NFF extend Jose Peseiro’s contract as Nigeria coach 

By Wale Mustapha

A congress member of Nigeria Football Federation, Mallam Yakubu Sarma has disclosed reasons for retaining Jose Peseiro as Coach of Super Eagles.

Mallam Sarma who is also the Chairman of Gombe State Football Association said the Federation decided not to repeat past mistakes when it relieved former coach, Gernot Rohr with few weeks to the last African Cup of Nations, AFCON held in Egypt.

“We are unperturbed when some people are making a noise that Peseiro was retained as Super Eagles coach. His retention is part of the development process of the NFF,” Sarma told media.

“We know what happened with Gernot Rohr. A few days to the last AFCON in Cameroon, a lot of issues came up and we dismissed him.

“And (Austin) Eguavoen had to come and start afresh and when he failed, everybody wanted his head. Nobody want to look at it that he did not even have the opportunity to pick his own team.

“If we had allowed Peseiro to leave, then whoever you are bringing will start building his own team and AFCON is just some three or four months away and that could have been a problem.

“We have hope, the target for Peseiro is semifinals but we want to believe that he will exceed that like [Randy] Waldrum who was able to meet his target. We want to believe too that Peseiro will meet his target with the right people on the ground.

“In football, there is nothing like giant of Africa again. Every country is a giant as far as football is concerned. So you don’t take any country for granted. I think where we have got wrong in the past is that our developmental programmes are very poor.

“We cannot just wake up overnight and just make a team. Take a cue from Senegal and some other countries, you will see that they have tried to develop their youth programmes and there is consistency.”

To justify NFF’s decision, Peseiro has qualified Nigeria for the next AFCON taking place in Ivory Coast early past of next year.