FOR THE LOVE OF COUNTRY OR THE LOVE OF MONEY?

Football coaches are like CEOs of corporations. For some reasons, they are among the only set of people who get huge sums of money for bad performance. Apparently someone in HR or in Management has decided that we should overwhelmingly reward bad performances.

Jose Mourinho allegedly got 40million British pounds for his woeful performance as Chelsea manager this season, a performance that has put them in the relegation zone for the first time in almost 20 years. Finally, the club management had to sack him. Well, sacking is the only name we can give it, but when you give some 40million pounds, you are not sacking him in my books.

Alas, he will go and spend a few million pounds sun tanning himself till summer when another club, perhaps Manchester United, would come and ask for his hands in marriage with another multi-million pounds pre-nuptials; that must be after Man U must have also rewarded Louis Van Gaal for maybe another bad performance.

So nice to be a football coach in England! Pass or fail, you get money, you have prestige, you have ranking!

This reward mechanism is however unfair to the fans who have to pay as much as 50pounds every game. What do they get? A lot of heartaches, anxious moments, tears, fury, disappointments, as their clubs spend exhorbitant amounts of money on players, coaches, kits, hotels etc. Footballers are treated like royalty, and the whole world listen in on every pre-match conferences as they analyses the sometimes, incoherent and shallow words of captains and coaches.

Turning from coaches to CEOs, same thing happens. Either at retirement or at a sack, CEOs have employed lawyers who made sure that the severance package of a typical CEO is so humoungously big that you would assume that he will never work again in his life. And having being sacked, they will take some of their money and use it for a publicity stunt, first writing a book about a career that saw them being sacked, and a few conferences they promote where they can pontificate over nothing, and afterwards, another hapless company comes to sign them on.

Shareholders are under-rewarded for putting their hard earned cash in the business. The company they own pays out millions to people who are entrusted with running them, whether or not they have performed creditably.

Second base; the same thing happens apparently also to our polity in Nigeria. We elect people to serve us, and they first ensure that their own interests are sorted first. The national assembly first sorted out their comfort and their huge allowances before settling down to the business of making laws for us or on our behalf. They arranged ‘armed robbers salaries’ and grand trappings of comfort for a 4-hour appearance 3 days a week job, while the rest of us, with so many working 16hours every day if you count the Lagos traffic, are left to share the crumbs.

While governments all over nation didn’t bother to pay their staff for several months, I never heard anyone from the executive and the legislature raise a voice. Non-payment of salaries were not something they ever worried about.

You then ask the question, are these people, coaches, CEOs and politicians doing what they are doing because they love their jobs, or because of the love of money involved?

Is the coach interested in the football, the trophies and the accolades more than he loves the money?

Even Nigerian coaches are not left behind in this racket. Stephen Keshi earned 5million naira a month! Sunday Oliseh was paid in advance about the same amount of money for months even before he had said “ listen up, y’all” to his boys. If you earn that money for two years, would you care if your team won or lost?

For the politicians, their job is their life. They will maim, kill or destroy if anyone tries to take their bone from them. A politician goes from one party to another, from one herbalist and prayer warrior to another just to keep himself in a position and to remain relevant. Some politician got 4 billion naira plus to arrange prayers so GEJ can win the last elections. Pastors and Imams allegedly were given huge sums of money to pray. Whoever collects money for prayers except those who are serving their gods for money! Oh the shame of it all, as big men began talking like babies; “ I only got 100m, not 500m from Dasuki, says one. They gave me 2 billion plus to run publicity for PDP, said another. We got 100m each for campaign logistics only, to be shared in our wards, yet another one”.

These are atrocious felonies, a government spending public funds for elections, and we are not even seeing that as a crime yet. We are so criminally desensitized in this country. Someone steals billions, and manages to return some millions, and they say, “at least he has returned money”. Even if I returned all plus interests, I should still have been jailed for stealing it in the first place.

I guess every body is there now for the love of money, not for the love of the very thing they are called to do.

Jose Mourinho can go and spend his millions quietly now. The rest of us, especially Chelsea management and supporters must now hope that Guus Hiddink can clean the mess he left behind, but so far, it doesn’t look like he has the talismanic touch. Thank God for Roman Abrahamovich’s billions, otherwise, only God knows what Chelsea would have done!