Every Second Counts

In case you missed it, FIFA, months back, rejected English Football Club, Leicester City’s transfer of Belgium’s Sporting Lisbon midfielder Adrien Silva because, according to FIFA, the club was 14 SECONDS TOO LATE with its application.Some reports suggest that Leicester did file its final paperwork to FIFA with seconds to spare, but it only arrived at football’s governing body 14 seconds after the deadline.Even though Leicester has now taken its appeal to the Court of Arbitration for Sport (CAS), the club is faced with a situation it might not have the services of the player until January over a bizarre 14-second delay in filing its application.Indeed, one second is all that it takes between life and death, success or failure.Yet here, we have no respect for time, even when time has no respect for anyone or anything. Perhaps, one reason why we are where we are is our lack of respect for time. Doing business can be so chaotic just because people are unable to keep to time or appointment. You drive many kilometres for a meeting with someone who excuses his absence away on the platter of ’something cropped up’. You wait for eternity before being ushered into a meeting with people who you soon realise have not taken time to prepare for the meeting. They have absolutely no clue what the meeting is about.You are at the meeting and people insist on going around in circles, sharing absolutely irrelevant stories, as if time is at a standstill. Yet every second ought to count.Our public events drag on unnecessarily. No sense of time management. We engage in endless repetition and sycophancy to recognise ’special’ guests with the Compere insisting on off-colour jokes, without attention to time and its essence.We carry on as if time has no place in our lives. We spend a whole lot of it on inanities and irrelevant stuff. Yet time should matter. Every second should count if we desire to make a success of life.In 2001, Mike Adenuga’s company, CIL, controversially lost out on the GSM licence already won in a bid, even when it had already made a $20 million deposit. Its crime was allegedly failing to pay the $265 million licence fee before the deadline hour of February 9th, 2001, even though CIL and Adenuga maintained that the money was indeed transferred to the JP Morgan account of the Federal Government of Nigeria by BNP Paribas before the deadline.Of course, there was the issue of the frequency allocated to CIL being then a subject of litigation between the FG and Chagoury, over which CIL wanted clarification before committing to a payment. But despite its reservations, CIL eventually elected to pay the $265 million fee at the very last minute. But the issue then became - Did CIL pay before the deadline as it claimed it did or it did not, as the government claimed? We might never know.But again, it tells us - every second counts. A night is like an eternity in business. Delivery was made in a client’s factory in the evening on cash on delivery basis, but payment could not be made in our favour as it was already late, as papers could not be processed that evening. We woke up, the following morning, to the news of the passing of the Head of state. The client, on account of that, has a change of mind. Opportunity lost for us. We waste so much time here. That, perhaps, explains why we struggle over what we should ordinarily have in our back pocket.Leicester is today paying for a debatable slip of 14 seconds. No doubt, time is everything. Every second counts.