After Nigeria Taekwondo failed to qualify for the Rio 2016 Olympics, I knew that the athletes will be abandoned and left to tend to their psychological traumas by themselves. So a couple of us decided to rightly welcome them properly at the Abuja International airport when the athletes flew in from Morocco via Lagos.
My heart felt very heavy when the four athletes walked out the airport entrance looking like orphans as they dragged their bags across the space to meet us. One burst into tears as she said to me, “I wish the technical team that took us to the last All African games was there. It would have been different.” For moments like this, the right words are hard to find so lengthy empathetic hugs are used to fill this void.
Certainly, the athletes should have qualified. No amount of sugarcoating will wipe away the fact that bad leadership decisions led to the non-qualification of the Nigeria Taekwondo team bidding to qualify for the last Rio 2016 Olympic Games.
For the sake of faded memories, the four Nigerian athletes that represented us at the African Olympic Qualification tournaments in January 2016 were all finalists at the All African Games which held just three months before the Olympic qualifiers.
All these talented athletes needed to do was get to the finals again in a similar African event, but all four failed to do so because of an ill-advised solitary leadership decision to replace the winning technical team that led the team to the All African Games with an ineffective political team for the Olympic qualifiers.
This particular situation with the Nigeria Taekwondo athletes was one that scarred me deeply because it did not need to happen. Even if Nigeria Taekwondo lacked major funding, we certainly did not lack the technical knowledge and goodwill to qualify for Rio 2016 Olympics.
What frightens me is what happened after we failed to qualify for Rio 2016 Olympics?
The leadership of the Nigeria Taekwondo Federation did not take responsibility for the failure. Up till today, there was no accountability whatsoever to the board or Nigeria Taekwondo community for the historic failure – no board meetings, no memos, no explanations, no resignations, nothing! Just silence and the passage of time.
When enough time had passed to blur memories, blames was put on “lack of no money” and exaggerated “rancour within the board”. It was conveniently forgotten that Nigeria Taekwondo won only one gold at 2015 All African Games, their worst result in 26 years. As with the Olympic qualifiers case, bad leadership that preferred solitary decision-making to collective board decisions is the primary culprit.
This ensured that the leadership failed its most important stakeholders – the athletes.
Certainly, these mischievous blames would not have seen the light of day if regular board meetings were held to make collective decisions with regards to the challenges facing the development of the sport.
The present situation makes the upcoming board elections a critical one for the future development of Nigeria Taekwondo, which has the honour of being one of the only five-sport federations out of forty-four that has won Olympic medals for the country. Without hesitation, I am positive that with the right kind of leadership in place, Nigeria Taekwondo can certainly repeat history.
From the challenges of funds generation to making of effective policies to ensuring there is an active implementation of operational plans, there is a lot of collective work to be done by the next board of the Nigeria Taekwondo Federation and whoever is elected to be President.
Surely, this is no time to sit on the fence and watch events play out in a manner that would only extend the misery of the sport and its athletes for another four years. It is important that facts are stated so decisions are made based on realistic facts rather than misleading half-truths whispered in the shadows.
While it is impossible to know if a change of guard will turn out to be the “right kind of leadership”, it would be certainly advantageous to the sport to take that risk rather than remain trapped with the failed “status quo”.
With the current leadership that refuses to acknowledge and learn from self-inflicted blunders, the danger with maintaining the “status quo” is that the ghastly hangover of the Rio 2016 Qualifiers can easily slither its tentacles to the Tokyo 2020 qualifiers. Thus, a continuation of the current leadership would only accelerate Nigeria’s Taekwondo downwards spiral into oblivion.
For the sake of athletes like the Rio 2016 Olympics Qualifiers team whose hopes were dashed and dreams broken as a consequence of bad leadership decisions, I am anxiously hopeful that the right kind of leadership is elected during the upcoming board elections.
