Amaju Pinnick was furious with the Editor-in-Chief of a top and respected football website who had published an interview of a certain Otunba Dele Ajayi who laid several accusations against the President of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) and several other top officials of the federation.
Ajayi had gone on radio to brazenly accuse the NFF boss and his top officials of financial fraud and misappropriation.
“There is a lot of mismanagement in the Nigeria Football Federation under Amaju Pinnick and I can tell you that for more than three years, there was no approval,” Ajayi said in an interview on Orange 94.5 FM.
“The board members were not aware of all the funds flying about, you can only talk of three or four people who are aware of those funds, there is no transparency.”
These accusations also didn’t come from just anyway, it came from Ajayi who was an important member of Pinnick’s cabinet during his first tenure as president of the NFF.
Ajayi held the important position of Chairman of the Finance and Appropriations Committee and currently, he is the Chairman of the Ondo State Football Association. His allegations could not be viewed with levity so Pinnick and the whole NFF kicked.
“I thought your platform was responsible,” Pinnick texted the editor of the football website that first published Ajayi’s interview.
“My lawyers are preparing a response,” Pinnick added.
NFF’s rejoinders
Amaju Pinnick has several times deny allegations of financial double-dealing in the NFF
The NFF swiftly responded with a statement that called Ajayi’s rant ‘bundles of lies and misleading information’. In a long statement, the NFF address some of Ajayi allegations, listing each of them and presenting their own side to falsify them.
The accusations range from financial mismanagement, abuse of power and lack of transparency. But the NFF denied them all.
They went ahead to discredit Ajayi, claiming that he was just a disgruntled ex-member who is ‘consumed by envy, bitterness and animosity’.
The claims from Ajayi were just one of the allegations Pinnick and the NFF have had to deal since October 2018. In fact, that statement the NFF released to deny Ajayi’s allegations was the third response to claims of similar nature in January alone.
The first was a statement to deny that President Muhammadu Buhari had directed NFF boss Pinnick to be prosecuted and placed on a travel ban over cases of financial mismanagement. “The report is completely unfounded and is only a product of the writer’s imagination,” the statement reads.
“The NFF President, who is also the 1st Vice President of the Confederation of African Football, has not received any such message from any of the agencies mentioned by the writer and has also never been placed on a travel ban.”
