I have thoroughly enjoyed watching the just finished Olympic Games. The old saying that the joy of Olympics is in participating but not winning is difficult to sell in a world where sports have replaced wars as a way of measuring the strength of states. This is happily so. Because of this, many states put a lot of resources and effort in organizing and ensuring that they win sporting events and not just participating. In other words, sports have become part of international politics. This is part of what we call cultural diplomacy in the study of international relations. It is cheaper and more effective than the expensive traditional diplomatic way of advancing the influence of states. The small country of Jamaica is probably more well known for good today than many bigger countries because of the achievement of its sports heroes. Usain Bolt the sprinter and his country do not have to hire lobbyists to make themselves known where it matters in the world. Sports as a way of advancing the interests, especially of poor countries in the periphery of world affairs has therefore become a useful tool in the hand s of diplomats. I remember when I was presenting my credentials as Nigeria’s ambassador to President Baron Richard Von Weisachker of Germany in 1991, he was more interested in the Nigerian soccer team and Nigerian writers – two areas constituting cultural diplomacy than in any other thing about my country. He did not ask me about Nigeria’s armed forces or gas and oil. The point I am making is that for our own good we have to place more emphasis on the development of our sports and culture generally, two areas in which we may have comparative advantage.
Our recent woeful performance at the Rio de Janeiro games in Brazil calls for comment. Those who were following our shoddy preparation for the games knew we were going to be embarrassed by its outcome. I feel thoroughly ashamed that our country of 170million people could only secure one bronze medal. We have been on slippery decline in our sports for years without much attention being paid to it. We concentrate only on soccer as if other sporting events are not important. Even in soccer we have not been doing well. We only manage to reach preliminary stages before we are eliminated. It seems we are satisfied with our pedestrian performance and yet we have a whole ministry of sports with the usual bureaucratic burden with no performance worthy of note to show for it. Our show of shame in Brazil should sadden all Nigerians even at this time of economic difficulties at home. Our athletes wore track suits they wore in the world athletics games in Beijing two years ago while most countries wore their traditional colourful outfits. We had always been cynosures of all eyes in our colourful dresses in years gone by. So what happened? Are there no more tailors in Nigeria to sew ordinary brocades or adire? The track suits and other outfits of the Nigerian contingent we are told arrived on the 13th day of the Rio games! The football team was stranded in Atlanta and we are told a Japanese plastic surgeon out of the goodness of his heart sent $200,000 to fly the team to Rio and promised to pay each member of the team $10,000 bonus if they won a medal. This is what is in the global media and if it is true it is most shameful. Have we become a banana republic that we cannot fund sending our team to an international sports event like the Olympics? This is so sad and sadder still when a statement was issued on behalf of our president urging the team to bring home medals. Everybody laughed at us and our children in diaspora were hugely embarrassed. We must remember that this is a critical economic constituency contributing perhaps more to our foreign exchange earnings than the so-called gas and oil sector whose so-called owners have been blackmailing the country and holding us by the jugular.
Somebody must take the blame for this humiliation in Rio in which the entire ECOWAS countries were wiped out. But for Kenya, South Africa and Ethiopia, Africa would have remained irrelevant in the Rio global sporting arena. The millions of dollars Nigeria spent in sending people to the Rio games was a waste of scarce resources. I suspect the money may not have been released on time but this problem should have been anticipated and dealt with expeditiously. We must learn the right lessons from this debacle by preparing now for the Tokyo games in 2020 and for the World Cup in Moscow two years from now. In doing this we must begin to look for fresh talents and not rely on the old and time wearied old hags we resurrect from the dead and expect them to perform. Most athletes are past their prime by the time they are 25 and we also have the problem of old people passing themselves as young people in order to cheat their ways into international competition where they are exposed when they meet genuine stars who are adequately prepared and trained.
There is much to do in our sports sector. We need to beef up the domestic league, bring back interstate soccer and athletics competition on yearly basis. The local soccer league should be organized as big business and our television stations should be forced to show them instead of a situation where everybody is talking about English, German, Italian and Spanish football leagues. If so organized, apart from footballers the local league will employ thousands of young people as stadium managers, grounds men, advertisers, masseuses, organizers physical trainers, physiotherapists, sports medicine practitioners, advance men, insurers, television and telecast technicians, accountants, nutritionists and so on. Sports all over the world is big business and the Nigerian is nothing but a sports loving person. In sports we can also find a means of escape from our boring and sometimes unhappy and depressing lives. It is not only the structure of government that needs restructuring, our social and sporting lives need radical transformation.
