Burundi's Lydia Nsekera named as FIFA's first female Executive Committee member

By Andrew Warshaw

May 22 – FIFA has appointed its first female Executive Committee member in a bid to restore credibility after the most scandal-tarnished period in its history.

Lydia Nsekera (pictured above), President of the Burundi Football Association and an International Olympic Committee (IOC) member since 2009, was co-opted on to the Executive Committee yesterday and will be formally installed at the FIFA Congress in Budapest on Friday.

She is due to accept an initial one-year tenure before an open election for the dedicated women’s post next year.

Nsekera is already a member of FIFA Committees for Women’s Football, the Women’s World Cup and the Organising Committee for the Olympic football tournament.

Her appointment represents one of the first concrete moves by FIFA President Sepp Blatter as part of his two-year road map to reform after the Executive Committee lost a string of powerbrokers caught up in bribery and corruption.

In an additional move to clean up world football’s governing body, Domenico Scala has been appointed as the independent chairman of the newly formed Audit and Compliance Committee which will monitor FIFA’s billion-dollar annual spending.

But some of FIFA’s other pledges due to take place in Budapest were put on the back burner temporarily.

Earlier this year FIFA announced that its Ethics Committee would be restructured, with one part of it to investigate potential wrongdoing and the other to adjudicate.

An announcement on who would lead these had been expected today but one of the candidates was ill so it was deferred.

“In view of this, the Executive Committee decided to hold an extraordinary meeting to designate both chairmen together once the FIFA Congress has approved the relevant amendments to the FIFA Statutes, which will come into force 60 days after the Congress,” a FIFA statement said.

That meeting will take place in Zurich in the first week of July when the new Code of Ethics is adopted and both chairmen will be named.

In other matters, FIFA said its players’ insurance programme was being extended to cover the Olympic tournament, a move that will go some way to placating clubs anxious not to incur any injuries among their best under-23 stars.

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