I had wanted to talk about something else today before I saw the photograph of the new Sports Minister, John Enoh, at the Nnamdi Azikiwe International Airport Abuja at 12.08 am physically receiving the country’s ambassadors to the World Athletic Championships held in Budapest. I shouted Eureka! Knowing that the minister wasn’t approaching the tasks of fixing our sports with blindfolded eyes. Enoh should have an interpersonal relationship with our sports ambassadors, especially the medal-winning sportsmen and women. Enoh’s first assignment is the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Whereas those countries expected to participate at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games would at the snap of their fingertips tell the world how many gold, silver and bronze medals based on time-tested indices that they have adopted as part of their respective countries’ sports cultures. In Nigeria, it is a guesswork largely because we have sports administrators who are mostly disorganised, with due respect to a few who truly know their onions.
If Enoh wants to succeed in this job, he needs to see things for himself as they happen and not rely on the claims and/or counterclaims of our sports administrators who have developed a penchant for getting into the different sports federations in the country only to contest elections at the international platforms of such federations. These Nigerian administrators know that membership of international bodies in their different sports guarantees them relevance and a place in the next election even if their sport in the country is literally lying in the morgue.
They couldn’t be bothered about the routine activities of our athletes, especially the star performers such as Amusan, Ese Brume et al who are already world beaters, whose preparations for the Paris 2024 Olympic Games should be topmost priority till after the multi-sports competition. It didn’t come as a surprise when Amusan was initially suspended from the World Athletics Championships held in Budapest. Instead of Amusan concentrating on her strategies of retaining her 100-metre hurdles title, she busied herself stating why she would come out clean of loading her system with steroids.
This tedious expedition for athletes who didn’t take the mandatory three out of competitions; drug tests being cleared looked more like an attempt to climb a greasy pole. Much of the argument to prove her innocence came from Amusan with the federation’s chieftains keeping sealed lips to the consternation of followers of the sport.
The lesson from this unfortunate incident is that both the athletes and the federation’s members should make it a point of duty to know the rules of their sport. The federations must allow their sub-committees to function. If the AFN has functional medical committee, the members ought to have known those who have undergone the Out of Competition Test (OCT) and those who haven’t. That way, the technical committee would be effectively guided when picking athletes to be invited for trials. The AFN in conjunction with the federation’s medical team ought to have done due diligence on the athletes selected to represent the country to know those eligible and those who aren’t.
The current AFN board should ensure that these new kids on the block are monitored, retrained, and given the best treatment in terms of their welfare packages, training grants, and those things others do to motivate their fresh kids on the tracks. The next Olympics is in Paris in 2024, meaning that the federation has barely one year to institute programmes that would make the kids winners again at the Olympics in the proverbial city in France, which anyone sees and dies. Good to know that something can come out of Nigeria that is good for the world to celebrate. I cherish listening to Nigeria’s anthem being sung at victory ceremonies. It has always been my best moment outside this country covering sporting events.
However, the honourable sports minister, winning laurels at big events is a project structured on workable models used by renowned sports polities. Most of these models are anchored on sports institutes that train coaches and sports managers. It also provides systems which are adopted by these countries’ teams during competitions. It is the reason we see certain countries play the same way with a few adjustments informed by how the opposition plays.
Countries such as Australia, America, Britain and recently Jamaica have models that developing countries like ours can adopt if we genuinely want to make the industry the business that it is in other climes. Our administrators made so much noise about adopting the Australian model after the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games. They were particularly fascinated by the feats achieved by the Australians. Several visits were made to Sydney to study the system. Some Australians came here. Our administrators raised hopes that the National Sports Institute (NIS) will be redesigned with the Australian model in mind. It never happened, largely because of the policy summersaults.
Of course, with a government that pays lip service to corporate sponsorships for sports, the blue-chip firms are not inspired to take the initiative. Even the few sports federations that seek sponsorship from these firms are unconvincing to a prospective sponsor when asked what a sponsoring company stands to gain from such investments. This will even be worse now considering the tightened noose on the economy’s neck a development that has left many firms rethinking their spending portfolio. And for such firms, every kobo for sponsorship must be worth its while for the return-on-investment.
A blueprint is sacrosanct for sports to thrive and it must be anchored on the desired need to resuscitate moribund grassroots competitions that engage the youths and take them away from the vices in the society.
The emergence of a sports policy endorsed by the government will create jobs such that this industry could in the next 10 years become the highest employer of labour.
The policy should challenge local government chairmen to build at least four mini-sports centres that would serve as playgrounds for their constituents in the absence of such structures in the schools in the 774 local government areas.
The beauty of sporting events is that there are markers to determine the winners quite distinct from the losers. This index rings true with the performance charts of the sporting federations in the country. Those Olympic Games regulars in the past for Nigeria such as boxing should quietly walk away. Those federations where members have served more than two terms should bow out. they cannot offer anything different from what they had exhibited in the last four years.
The diabolical way in which some people remain in the federations simply because they are members of their international federations is unacceptable. They were able to contest for such positions because Nigeria made them members of her federations where they sought and won elections. Sports cannot be lying prostrate while those who volunteered to revive the industry sit tight in the place on the altar of being international federations’ officials.
If the athletes aren’t competing for laurels in sports, there can’t be officials. So, if the officials have outlived their usefulness by failing to discover, nurture and expose our athletes to represent Nigeria in big competitions, they should go.
In other climes, government has incentives for firms that support sports such as tax holidays and/or rebates. Most of our federations are handicapped by the kind of members they have who are mainly self-seekers, craving to get into their federations’ international bodies. It doesn’t matter if the sports they superintend don’t organise one competition in their four-year tenures.
Are sports truly “play play” as one former governor once described it? Who will challenge us to see sports as a platform to bolster the country’s revenue? Doesn’t the government know that sports is the best vehicle for massive employment? You tell me.
