Move on with your life, Chukwu tells Keshi

Former Super Eagles coach Christian Chukwu has told Stephen Keshi not to bother trying to retain the Nigerian national team coaching role.

Keshi

This comes as a former Nigerian captain, Joseph Yobo has described Eagles failure to qualify for the Africa Cup of Nations kicking off next month, under the

stewardship of Keshi, as a bad development.

Keshi, who won the African Cup of Nations as both a player and a coach, was axed during Nigeria’s 2015 AFCON qualifying campaign. He was subsequently recalled, but was unable to steer his country to a place in Equatorial Guinea.

The former Togo and Mali coach is currently waiting for NFF to give him a new contract, but former coach Chukwu has advised him to seek new pastures rather than to wait around for the Nigerian Football Federation to come to a decision.

“Well, my candid advice to Keshi, you know with all this problems in the NFF, it will take a long time for the association to sit and start deciding anything about the technical crew, I think if he has a better offer anywhere he is free to go and his contract will be respected more outside the country because I am talking out of experience,” Chukwu was reported as saying by Megasport.

Speaking for the first time since the tragedy in Uyo, Yobo said he was pained that the reigning African champions would not be defending their trophy in Equatorial Guinea.

Yobo noted that he expected the coaches to have used younger and talented players to prosecute the AFCON qualifiers but wondered what went wrong with the team

“It is quite disappointing that the team will not be at the Nations Cup. It is disappointing for the country as a whole. It is bad thing. But we have to recover from this quickly.

“I spent about 13 years with the national team and I don’t think it is a matter of if I was there that this could have happened or it couldn’t have happened. But I left the scene for younger players to have the chance to play at the biggest level because I also started while I was a young player,” he told journalists in Abuja, while watching the training session of Nigeria’s U-23 team being coached by Samson Siasia.