Elite Athletes choking life out of the sports festival

One of the biggest challenges facing sports in Nigeria is how to ensure a bottom-up approach to development.

The concept of development, as everyone very well knows,involves engendering steady and consistent change from a level of rustiness or rawness to a polished and productive state.

A casual observer of Nigerian sports over the years particularly in the last two and half decades will readily agree that ‘developed’ is not a word that can be used to qualify it. It is anything but developed, and that is putting it mildly considering its potential and the avalanche of funds pumped into it over the years by government and the private sector, by way of sponsorship.

It does not require much exercise of the imagination to situate this malady in its proper context. Simply put, over the years, administrators of Nigerian sports have tried to build castles in the air. They have, quite literally, tried, to use the analogy of building, to erect a gargantuan edifice on shaky foundation. Or put another way, they have tried to make an omellete without breaking the egg!

What do I mean by this? It is simple. To achieve the consistent and productive state of any endeavour, a fundamental requirement is planning. This planning entails erecting the building blocks and then following it up with the addition of other structures and fittings and then when the product has reached finish stage, a strategy for maintenance is devised.

The designers of Nigerian sports policy in 1973 took a step akin to erecting the building blocks of Nigerian sports when they came up with the idea of the National Sports Festival. At the time, the Sports Festival had two broad objectives. One of this was to use the Games as a vehicle of fostering national unity, which had been badly shaken by the fratricidal civil war of 1967-1970. The other key objective, which I believe was of more concern to our sports policy framers, was to use the Sports Festival as a nursery for the growing of talents or an assembling line outputting talent for use by the nation in international sporting engagements.

The idea was as sound as any conceived anywhere. In the immediate aftermath of commencement of the Games, the Nigerian sports scene witnessed a ferment of activities with talents bursting on the scene with a frequency and consistency not seen in the years before. The Games became a proving ground for talent, a crucible of display of sporting skills and a platform for young Nigerians to positively released pent up energy.

A lot of the names Nigerians hold in awe today:, the Peter Okodogbes, Seguin Odegbamis, Mary Onyalis, Falilat Ogunkoyas to name just a few, were products of the Sports Festival. It was no coincidence that the 1970s and 1980s were of not only intense sporting activity for Nigeria but equally the periods Nigeria made its mark on the international sporting scene in areas like athletics, football and boxing. The Sports Festival clearly played a key role as it consistently fed our national teams with a pool of talents, which helped Nigeria win laurels internationally and burnish its image abroad. The remarkable thing about it all was that these young talents were mostly either students in secondary or tertiary institutions or recent graduates of both.

Even though over the years the festival diminished in quality due in part to the exodus of our sportsmen abroad in search of better opportunities, it still remained a platform for young Nigerians and aspiring champions to compete against their peers and prove their mettle.

Then came that harebrained decision of our sports policymakers in 2006, to expand the scope of participants at the Games to include elite athletes. These elite athletes, established professionals in their own right and many of them being internationally recognised athletes and champions, were given leave to compete among budding talents many of who were young enough to be their children.

As far as policies go, it was a major disaster and sounded the death knell of the Games. Since that unfortunate decision, the Sports Festival has become the playground of states who spend millions to bring in elite athletes from their bases abroad, house them in expensive hotels, and spend millions more compromising technical officials in order to “secure their investments”.

This manipulation of Games officials in order to win at all costs has killed the spirit of fair competition, has dampened the spirits of budding home-based athletes who watch helplessly as funds that would otherwise have been deployed for their training, welfare and provision of training equipment and facilities, are deployed to massage the egos of foreign based elite athletes who spend only a few days at the Games and fly back to base.

There is no way sports can meaningfully develop with this ill-conceived strategy. My experience at the last Games in Abuja in 2018 confirms. The entry of elite athletes into the fray has turned the Games into a commodity to be purchased by the state with the deepest pockets. Unless a conscious attempt is made to redress this anomaly, it is futile expecting a turnaround in our sports fortunes. Elite athletes must be taken out of the Sports Festival and locked out!

The reality starkly staringes us in the face is that if states don’t rechannel the humongous sums they fritter away on elite athletes at the Games to grassroots sports development, which includes at the very basic level, the provision of facilities for training and competition, provision of equipment and providing grants to athletes, sports development will remain a mirage.

In Edo State, we are changing existing paradigms and retooling the Sports development matrix. The Edo State Sports Commission, which I preside over as Chairman, with the active support of the State Government is working assiduously to put in place mini sports stadia in all the local government areas in the state. We are also putting final touches to our programme of training and sending coaches to schools in the state.

Our plans are anchored on the belief that the grassroots is the bedrock of sports development. If we get it right at this level, every other thing will fall into place. It is the way to go if we must initiate a turnaround in Nigeria’s sporting fortunes.