FIFA on Friday named a five-member Normalisation Committee to oversee the governance of the Namibia Football Association until a new leadership has been elected.
The committee comprises of chairperson Hilda Basson-Namundjebo, deputy chair Franco Cosmos, Gaby Ahrens, Matti Mwandingi and Vivienne Katjiuongua.
When making the announcement in Windhoek yesterday, Fifa’s director of development for Africa and the Caribbean Veron Mosengo-Omba said the committee members were still due an integrity check but that they could get the ball rolling in working to remedy 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.
Basson-Namundjebo is a renowned businesswoman, Cosmos, Mwandingi and Katjioungua are all lawyers by profession and Gaby Ahrens heads the Namibia Athletes Commission.
“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, what they have done in football or not are part of a lot of criteria [used to assess the members],” Veron Mosengo-Omba said.
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 committee will perform its functions until it has fulfilled all of its tasks, but no later than 31 May 2019.
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.”
