Finance Ministry, CBN scramble to pay Super Eagles after boycott threat at AFCON

Nigeria is racing to avert a crisis at the ongoing Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) after the national football team threatened to boycott Saturday’s quarter-final clash against Algeria over unpaid bonuses.

The players, preparing to face Algeria on Saturday, disclosed that they had not received match bonuses dating back to their group-stage victories, despite Nigeria’s strong run at the tournament. The threat stunned fans at home, coming barely two months after a similar dispute erupted during World Cup qualifiers, a campaign Nigeria ultimately failed to survive.

Public outrage followed swiftly. Many Nigerians criticised football authorities and government officials for what they described as a recurring pattern: efficiency in the wrong places, and dysfunction where competence matters most. Former Labour Party presidential candidate Peter Obi was among prominent voices who lambasted the government over the episode.

The crisis forced a public response from the federal government. In a statement posted on X, Minister of State for Finance Nkiruka Uzoka-Anite confirmed that payments had not been completed, blaming administrative and foreign-exchange bottlenecks.

She said the federal government and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) had now “successfully streamlined” foreign-exchange processing to enable payment of the bonuses, adding that group-stage funds had been released and final transfers were “currently in flight” to players’ domiciliary accounts.

“Going forward, the process will be fully streamlined to ensure faster, more predictable disbursements aligned with international best practice,” Uzoka-Anite said, adding that the focus was to keep players “fully supported” as the tournament enters the knockout stage.

But the assurances did little to calm public anger. Olumide Oni argued that the episode revealed deeper, systemic dysfunction involving not just the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) but also the federal government and the CBN.

“The bottleneck was not inevitability, but indifference until embarrassment loomed,” Oni wrote. “Systems that move with lightning speed for indulgence and patronage suddenly become glacial when earned entitlements are involved.”