The technical sub-committee of the Nigeria Football Federa­tion (NFF) has dismissed as a ruse, fears that the country may lose the services of Stephen Kes­hi to another country if steps are not quickly taken to renew his contract.
A member of the committee, Paul Bassey, who spoke yesterday in Abuja said no country was desperate to sign the Eagles manager.
Bassey argued that Keshi would have since put pen to paper for one of the other countries, if it were true that any of them needed his services.
He warned against taking a hasty decision on the issue against the back­drop of the decision of the executive committee to see the contract renewal talks concluded in no time.
“What I don’t want to hear is all this talk of our hastily renewing his contract to wade off other countries looking for his services. If it were true, those countries would have signed him by now. The good thing is that Keshi has said he wants to come back if the terms are right. So for us, the challenge is to look at those conditions. It will be wrong to go ahead without looking at those conditions,” Bassey said.
Bassey said Keshi had not even sub­mitted his technical report after the Brazil 2014 World Cup.
“We can’t pretend that everything went fine as if nothing happened in Brazil. Most of us believe that we should have done better than we did at the World Cup. Though the board believe Keshi’s contract should be renewed, however, those of us in the technical committee believe that we also need to do a thorough appraisal of what happened in Brazil.
“We need to know what happened on and off the field. He has not even sub­mitted his technical report that would explain players’ performance index on and off the field. In fact, it is not even a Keshi thing but that of all stakehold­ers. We want to establish where we went wrong.
“One of the things we also need to look at is the issue of his pay. If we were not able to pay Keshi N5 mil­lion regularly how can the federation now pay the N10 million he is now de­manding? And if we want to give him more, we should make sure that we can pay. It is not enough to agree that we will pay him N10m. Some of us be­lieve that moving forward we have to look backwards.
“Let’s not make mistakes due to what happened in the past. We shouldn’t be in a hurry to take any decision. We have advised the board, it’s left for them to take the final decision,” he warned.

…We won’t rush into contract renewal –Bassey