NFA revamp begins

THE direction which the Namibia Football Association takes will be clearer after Tuesday, said Hilda Basson-Namundjebo who Fifa on Friday appointed to head the Normalisation Committee for the country’s afflicted football body.

Also on the The Bureau of the Fifa Council assigned transitional body are deputy chair Franco Cosmos, Gaby Ahrens, Matti Mwandingi and Vivienne Katjiuongua.

Basson-Namundjebo is a renowned businesswoman, Cosmos, Mwandingi and Katjioungua are all lawyers by profession, while Ahrens, one of Namibia’s most decorated elite athletes in trap shooting, heads the Namibia Athletes Commission.

“Right now, we don’t have preconceived ideas of what our job is but when we sit on Tuesday [tomorrow], we will see what’s needed,” Basson-Namudjebo said.

“That meeting will have the focus of us understanding our mandate; specifically the NFA statutes and what that enables us to do as the next steps.”

The five-member Normalisation Committee has a four-month mandate to oversee the governance of the Namibia Football Association until a new leadership has been elected.

Whether long-serving divisive secretary general Barry Rukoro stays on is also up to the Normalisation Committee.

“Today, this Normalisation Committee are the bosses of football in Namibia and they will prepare and run football the way they see fit,” Fifa’s director of development for Africa and the Caribbean Veron Mosengo-Omba said when making the announcement in Windhoek.

The committee members have passed a credibility assessment but are still due an integrity check, he said. However, they have the green light to begin working on a remedy for the afflictions that beset the governance of the game in Namibia.

“The situation in Namibian Football Association is very difficult. It is affecting football and Fifa cannot accept that football is not played properly in one of its member associations,” Mosengo-Omba told reporters.

Cosmos is the only member of the Normalisation Committee with a notable football background, being the current Blue Waters chairman. In 2017, he also headed the Namibia Premier League interim committee which had a not too dissimilar function to that of the Normalisation Committee.

Katjioungua too has prior senior sport administration experience, having chaired the Namibia Sports Commission and Netball Namibia.

“It is the discretion and power of Fifa to decide who can be given the mandate for this. They report only to Fifa. We interviewed a lot of valuable people. Their backgrounds, competence and what they have done in football or not are part of a lot of criteria [used to assess the members],” Mosengo-Omba said.

“Fifa has contacts everywhere. We have the best connection, even better than the UN [United Nations],” he continued.

“So we asked our contacts. We received a lot of CV’s and at the end of the day we had to decide.

The normalisation committee will primarily act as an electoral committee and none of its members will be eligible for any of the positions in the elections.

“The normalisation committee is tasked to run the NFA’s daily affairs but they will not have a seat in the federation. They will oversee the NFA; to ensure that members of the NFA whose executive committees are out of mandate, organise and conduct relevant elections; and once elections have been held at member level, to organise and conduct elections of a new NFA executive committee,” the senior Fifa official continued.

The appointment follows a visit by a Fifa delegation to Namibia in December during which it observed that “there are two factions within the NFA that are irreconcilable and that this situation is adversely affecting football as a whole.”

The factions are led by Rukoro and his one-time superior and now nemesis Frans Mbidi, whose term as NFA president ended in December.