Nigeria Content Online

I read Innocent Egbunike’s article, written in 2007 after
Nigeria’s barren outing at that year’s Athletics World Championship in Japan
and republished in this paper last Sunday, and felt pain.

In that piece, Egbunike, who by any stretch of the imagination
is one of Nigeria’s most accomplished sportsmen, exposed the folly of our
sports administrators whose major interest is to amass as much wealth as
possible at the expense of the athletes who toil under the most difficult of
conditions.

A crying shame

In that thought-provoking article aptly titled “Failure to plan
is a plan to fail”, the former Nigerian quarter miler now a coach in Qatar,
goes back twenty years to show that nothing has really changed in the way
Nigerian athletics officials (and indeed) sports administrators in general,
short change athletes and treat them with disdain.

Egbunike writes of his experience in 1987 during the All Africa
Games in Nairobi. “In 1987, Nigeria flew me from Los Angeles to New York, New
York to Lagos, Nigeria and finally Lagos to Nairobi, Kenya, for the African
Games. I remember getting to Nairobi the morning of my event to find out that
there were no room arrangements made for me. I went to the officials after my
first round in the 400m to find out that they did not have any room for me. At
that point, I realised my battle was not against flesh and blood, but the
powers and principalities of darkness. I laid a mattress on the floor of my
teammates and slept there throughout the duration of the competition. What
surprised me was how the same officials, who did not provide me my
accommodations, took all the glory for my performance. That was 20 years ago.
Now in 2007, it is the same story.” Same story indeed.

You only need to look at the 2010 version of the Bolekaja or
Gwongworo (truck) used to ferry the victorious Falcons in Lagos upon their
return from the African Women’s Championships, in South Africa, to understand
that it is the same old story. I have said it again and again in this column
and elsewhere, we need to change our attitude vis a vis the treatment of our
sportsmen. Like Egbunike rightly says in the article, athletes are the raison
d’ etre of any sports set up. They are the essence of any process engineered by
the sports department whether you choose to call it sports ministry or council.
Without them, any exercise is futile.

A pool of talent

I have followed Nigerian athletics for a very long time and have
come to the conclusion that our failure to stand up and be counted in recent
times is not due to either dearth of talent or lack of effort on the part of
our athletes. The basic reason has been because we have had officials both at
the Athletics Federation of Nigeria and the Sports Ministry, who have failed to
harness the overabundance of talent here at home while reaching out to former
athletes in the Diaspora for their inputs. It is a sad commentary that given
the cumulative intellectual capital available to Nigerian athletics, the sport
remains mired in mediocrity in Nigeria. There is simply no reason for this. I
stand to be corrected, but I think that there is no sport in Nigeria (including
football) that rivals athletics in terms of sheer number of educated former
athletes.

In Bruce Ijirigho, Charlton Ehizuelen, Felix Imadiyi, Innocent
Egbunike, Maria Usifo, Pat Itanyi, The Ezinwa brothers, Chidi Imoh, Olapade
Adenekan, Falilat Ogunkoya-Omotayo, Mary Onyali-Omagbemi, Fatimah Yusuf and her
husband, Adewale Olukoju to mention a few, Nigeria has a large reservoir of
talent to enrich the sport. Why are we not availing ourselves of the
opportunity presented by this avalanche of talent? As we temporize, we lose
them to other nations. Right now, one of our best athletics coaches, Tony Osheku,
is in Libya helping that country develop the sport. At the African
Championships in Kenya, one of his athletes won gold for Libya. Our
administrators must wake up and begin to behave responsibly so that the present
slide can be checked; otherwise things may get irretrievably worse.