When Abacha denied Kanu best shot at Afcon triumph

As the only player to win the Premier League, FA Cup, Champions League, Uefa Cup and Olympic Gold medal, Nwankwo Kanu was a born winner.
The lanky striker venerated by Nigeria and Arsenal fans, was also named African Player of the Year twice. But Kanu never won a single African Cup of Nations title.
To call it destiny is to kill the debate. But politics played a big role.
Kanu’s emergence on the soccer scene coincided with one of the worst dictatorships in Nigeria’s post-independence history.

Two months after a 17-year-old Kanu scored five goals (including a hat-trick in the 8-0 demolition of Canada) in Group B, finishing second joint-top scorer as Nigeria’s Golden Eaglets lifted the 1993 Fifa U-17 World Cup in Japan, Gen Sani Abacha, then defence minister and most senior official in the Nigerian military, forced out President Ernest Shonekan and took over.

In October, Dutch giants Ajax signed Kanu from Iwuanyanwu Nationale, on an undisclosed fee, handing him a league debut five months later. Kanu, alongside Nigerian teammate George Finidi, who joined Ajax at the same time, won the Dutch league title twice.
They also featured as Louis van Gaal’s youthful Ajax upset a star-studded AC Milan 1-0 to win the 1995 Champions League final.
The politics

Kanu, at18, could not make Nigeria’s triumphant 1994 African Cup of Nations squad. But he will forever rue Nigeria’s absence at the 1996 edition in South Africa.
At the peak of Abacha’s row with Nelson Mandela, Abacha stopped the Super Eagles from travelling to South Africa because he “could not guarantee their safety.”
But, the New York Times wrote before the tournament, “Everyone assumes he’s doing it to snub Mandela, who has repeatedly called for an oil boycott of Nigeria for executing Ken Saro-Wiwa and eight other dissidents...”
Caf threatened a six-year ban on Nigeria if they missed the tournament but Abacha stuck to his gun. The ban saw Nigeria miss Afcon ‘98 in Burkina Faso as well. Another wasted opportunity for Kanu. Ironically, Mandela’s Bafana Bafana won the 1996 edition.

Nigerian players issued statements backing their militant ruler’s decision, but they were speaking their mind.
“We had a military government,” captain Sunday Oliseh told The Nationale just before Nigeria’s long awaited Afcon triumph in 2013.
“So that meant there were certain things you couldn’t really talk about. But…the team we had at the time ticked all the right boxes.
“We had speed, strength and craftiness. We were African champions in 1994, and went to the World Cups in 1994 and 1998 and went through to the knockout stages.”
With Kanu, Finidi, Rashid Yekin, Jay-Jay Okocha, among others, the Super Eagles were simply the team to beat. Except that they could not beat Abacha first.

Kanu featured in six Afcon editions, but the closest he got was the shoot-out final defeat to Cameroon in 2000.
The vengeful victory
Erasing 1996 from Kanu’s story is erasing almost his entire biography. It was the year of his extreme highs and lows. A missed Afcon debut, an Olympic triumph, a switch to Inter Milan, and heart surgery that threatened his career.
The 1996 Olympic Gold medal is Kanu’s biggest accolade. Yet the preparation
was shambolic. Kanu and Tijani Babangida preoccupied with transfers, and often darting out of camp; players lacked allowances for three weeks in camp and using their own money to book buses to training grounds.
Coach Jo Bonfrere had just returned on the request of his players, having resigned due to unpaid wages. But losing a friendly 3-1 to Togo almost led to his sacking, days to the Olympics.

But Kanu and others decided to play for themselves, their coach and their nation.
“It was something special,” Kanu told Fifa.
com in 2013. “For us to go there, become the first African team to win it, beating three huge teams in the process, is something special.”
The three teams were Mexico, Brazil and Argentina, which Nigeria defeated (in that order) after beating Hungary 1-0, Japan 2-0 and losing to favourites Brazil 1-0 in the first round.

In the final, Claudio Lopez and Hernan Crespo’s goals either side of Celestine Babayaro’s equaliser gave Argentina a 2-1 lead in 50 minutes. The Nigerians’ dream was becoming a nightmare. Daniel Amokachi, then at Everton, equalised
in the 74th minute,. Extra-time beckoned.
But in the 90th minute, Wilson Oruma’s dipping free-kick found Emmanuel Amunike unmarked in the area.

He netted the winner, which Argentine playmaker Ariel Ortega protested as “offside.”
Years later Argentine defender Roberto Ayala admitted to TheFootballTimes: “That Nigeria team was the best they ever had.”
But if it wasn’t for Kanu’s heroics in the semis, it would perhaps have been a different story.
Beating the best Nigeria’s best display was the semifinal victory over 1994 World Cup winners Brazil. With Ronaldo, Rivaldo, Roberto Carlos and Juninho, another triumph in two years in the USA for Mario Zagallo’s men looked very likely.
“At the time everybody knows they were the best in the world, with players turning out for teams like Barcelona, so we were certainly a little scared ,” Kanu told Fifa.com 20 years later.

But Kanu’s magic lifted Nigeria. At 3-1, Zagallo withdrew Ronaldo and Juninho, as if it was over. But in the 78th minute, Victor Ikpeba came off the bench to score Nigeria’s second, a ferocious shot just outside the area.
It was not enough, though. Then Kanu, the captain, took over the show.
In the 90th minute, with the Brazilians waiting for the final whistle, Kanu silenced them with a scrambled equaliser off Okocha’s long throw-in into the area.
At 3-3, the Brazilians were mentally defeated. The Nigerians uplifted, as Kanu scored the golden goal, pouncing on a long ball that had bounced off Ikpeba’s back. A feint on his right foot put out two Brazil defenders, before he thumped the ball with his left into the net, settling what many consider as the best ever Olympic football match.
In his 2017 essay, “Uniting a Nation: The untold story of how Kanu and co. upstaged the favourites in ’96 against the odds,” Aanu Adeoye, who was just two years old, wrote: “The time difference meant the game was played around midnight but that was no deterrent for households to empty onto the streets after the Brazil game, my brother told me, as strangers hugged and cheered loudly, setting off bonfires and celebrating well into the night.”

What a way to show Abacha what he had denied the nation. Kanu was immensely gifted. But it is such moments of individual brilliance that settle him in the enviable territory between legend and cult-hero for Nigeria and Arsenal. Moments like his 15-minute hat-trick that overturned a 2–0 deficit into Arsenal win over an in-form Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in 1999.
Such brilliance also won him two African Player of the Year awards.
[email protected]