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The decade that began in 1990 and ended in 2000 was a period of boon for Nigerian sports.

In that period,
which had begun rather tamely with the country winning a bronze medal
at the 1992 Africa Cup of Nations in Senegal, Nigeria went on to record
its biggest sporting successes on the international sporting arena.

In football,
Nigeria’s senior men’s football team, the Super Eagles became one of
the most feared teams in world football after winning the Africa Cup of
Nations in Tunisia in 1994 and wowing spectators with its delectable
brand of football at the World Cup where it narrowly missed out on a
quarter-final berth after falling 2-1 to Italy. It finished the year
ranked the fifth best team in the world.

Two years later,
Nigeria’s U-23 men’s football team shocked the world at the Atlanta
1996 Olympics when it scalped world football powers, Brazil and
Argentina on its way to winning gold in the football event.

Years of triumph

In the 1990s,
Nigerian athletics, which had been flowering in the 1980s with the
exploits of athletes like Innocent Egbunike, Chidi Imoh, Mary Onyali,
Olapade Adenekan, Ajayi Agbebaku, Falilat Ogunkoya, Fatima Yusuf,
Adewale Olukoju and the Ezinwa brothers, Davidson and Osmond, reached
its apogee with Chioma Ajunwa leaping to gold in Long Jump at the
Atlanta Games on August 2. That medal, which came twenty-four hours
before the gold in men’s football, marked the first time Nigeria would
be winning a gold medal in its forty-four years of participation at the
Olympics.

Atlanta was to
prove a watershed for Nigerian athletics with our athletes winning a
total of one gold, one silver and two bronze medals. It was arguably
our best outing at the Olympics. The closest we have come since was at
the Sydney Olympics where we won one gold and three silver medals, the
gold coming by default after the United States of America, which beat
Nigeria to the gold in the men’s 4x400m had the medal withdrawn
following revelations that some of its athletes who competed in that
race had used performance enhancing drugs.

Duncan Dokiwari’s
bronze medal in Men’s Super Heavyweight boxing event at Atlanta
completed a memorable Olympics for Nigeria, its best performance in
four decades and the best overall since.

The 1990s ended
with Nigeria winning one silver and one bronze medal at the 1999
edition of the Athletics World Championship, which held in Seville,
Spain. Glory Alozie grabbed the silver in the women’s 100 metres
hurdles while Francis Obikwelu coasted to bronze in the men’s 200
metres. Both athletes were to dump Nigeria for Spain and Portugal
shortly after.

Downward spiral

If the decade that
ended in 2000 had been a glorious one for Nigeria sports, the one that
has just ended cannot be said to have been altogether successful for
the country. While there may have been spurts of brilliance and
achievement by Nigerian sportsmen and women, the nation’s overall
impact in global sports diminished considerably.

In athletics,
Nigeria, which used to hold its own against world powers like the USA,
and Britain found itself playing catch up with countries like China and
Japan, which were once considered outsiders.

At the Athletics
World Championships for instance, Nigeria has failed to land a single
medal since Alozie and Obikwelu put us on the medals table in 1999. The
stark reality is that Nigeria, which between the first edition in
Helsinki, Finland in 1983 and the Seville edition in 1999 chalked up
three silver medals and two bronze, has failed to get on the medals
podium in the last five editions.

By contrast,
African countries like Kenya and Ethiopia which are considerably poorer
than Nigeria in terms of financial resources and pool of talent, have
between them won 79 medals in the last five editions with Kenya
recording 15 gold, 14 silver and 14 bronze medals and Ethiopia chalking
up 13 gold, 12 silver and 11 bronze medals. It has been the same story
at the Olympics. Since 2000 Nigeria has only won two bronze medals in
athletics both of them coming in the relays at the Athens 2004 Olympics.

In football, the
story has been worse. Nigeria, which in the mid 1990s exerted
continental dominance in football and was dreaded globally, lost its
pre-eminent position in Africa and became cannon fodder for teams
outside the African continent. Its senior national team, the Super
Eagles in the last four editions of the Africa Cup of Nations managed
three semi-final finishes and a quarter-final ouster at the 2008
edition in Ghana under the guidance of German coach, Berti Vogts.

Drain pipe

The Eagles
performance reached its nadir at last year’s World Cup in South Africa
where it failed to advance to the second round of the tournament
despite being presented with a golden opportunity to do so. That
performance rankled Nigerians and led to calls for the disbandment of
the squad.

While exact figures
cannot be produced, it is obvious from amounts bandied in the media as
having been spent on preparing the team for tournaments that the Super
Eagles have cost Nigeria billions of naira in the last ten years with
little to show for it.

“The Eagles have
not justified the billions spent on them. The last time we won
something good… was in 1994 when they won the Africa Cup of Nations
and played at World Cup in the USA. All they have given us in the last
16 years have been bronze medals,“ said Harrison Jalla, President of
the National Association of Nigerian Footballers (NANF).

At club football
level, the game has remained rooted in mediocrity with
maladministration making nonsense of efforts by footballers playing on
the local scene, to put up decent performances.

Today, eleven years
after the professional league kicked off not one single club is
privately owned. All of them with their managements largely controlled
by cronies of the governors whose states fund them, struggle with the
payment of players’ salaries and allowances.

Internationally,
these clubs struggle to make an impact in continental club competitions
with our biggest achievement at club level in the last ten years being
Enyimba FC of Aba’s back to back victories in the Confederation of
African Football (CAF) Champions League in 2003 and 2004. Sadly, that
club, which made around $2 million from those victories, finds it
difficult today to pay players’ wages and allowances.

That should hardly
be a surprise anyway given that even the Nigeria Premier League (NPL),
the body saddled with the task of ensuring the league runs smoothly, is
itself far from organised. It has been unable to justify the N3 billion
sponsorship fund meant for running of the league. At the moment, the
body is mired in crises with its leadership being fired last week by
the executive committee of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF)
following its inability to resolves the conflict emanating from its
election into office. Aside, the sack of its leadership, the NPL is
coping with two cases in court, one instituted by it against former
league sponsors, Globacom over the latter’s refusal to release the last
batch of funds under its sponsorship agreement and the other instituted
against the NPL by Globacom for handing rival telecommunications
company, MTN, league sponsorship rights three weeks ago.

Generally, Nigeria’s saving grace in football in the last ten years has been the performance of its women.

Despite being
repeatedly treated shabbily by Nigeria’s football managers, Nigerian
ladies have remained a source of pride to the country. The Super
Falcons, our senior women’s national team, has dominated women’s
football in a way that no other team on the continent has. Of the five
editions of the Africa Women’s Championships, which held in the last
ten years, the Falcons won four-2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2010 –
making them the undisputed leaders on the continent.

More blues

Aside football and
athletics, there was marked decline in other sports with Nigeria ceding
authority in events like boxing and table tennis, which in the past had
earned it global renown. In boxing, the exploits of former professional
and amateur pugilists like Dick “Tiger” Ihetu, Hogan “kid” Bassey
Nojeem Maiyegun, Obisia Nwankpa, Abraham “Assassin” Tonica, Hogan “
Atomic Bomb” Jimoh, Joe Lasisi, Eddie Ndukwu, Tony and Davidson Andeh,
Billy Famous, Dele Jonathan, Peter Konyegwachie, Christopher Ossai and
Jeremiah Okorodudu etc, failed to inspire a new generation of fighters
to glory.

Our performance in
the sport in the last decade has been abysmal to say the least,
reaching its lowest at last year’s Commonwealth Games in India where
our boxers were battered to submission in all their bouts. Rather than
return from the games with medals as was the case in previous
competitions, our boxers and officials came back empty-handed engaging
in recrimination and counter recrimination.

In table tennis,
our players also lost considerable ground with most of them dropping
out of the international ranking system; the same was the case for
tennis.

A harvest of ministers

One of the factors
responsible for Nigeria’s decline in global sports has been identified
as the instability of leadership in the sports establishment coupled
with what observers see as the lack of properly defined structures and
functions for the National Sports Commission, which despite being the
country’s sports governing body, is not backed up by an enabling law.

Figures show that
between 2000 and 2010, Nigeria had a total of 11 ministers of sports-
Damishi Sango, Ishaya Mark Aku, Steven Akiga, Musa Mohammed, Samaila
Sambawa, Bawa Kaoje, Abdulrahman Gima, Alhassan Zaku, Sani Ndanusa,
Ibrahim Bio and Taoheed Adedoja.

With eleven
ministers taking charge of the sports ministry in ten years, the
articulation of long term development strategies have proved difficult.
Matters have not been helped by the fact that the bulk of the ministers
had practically no understanding of the terrain into which they had
been thrust and had absolutely no desire to learn on the job. This
coupled with a clear absence of administrative acumen on their part
meant that no meaningful development could take place. These ministers
who were largely loyal members of the party in power at the federal
level of government were thus open to manipulation by crafty career
civil servants who had spent decades in the ministry and knew how to
“tweak” the system for their benefit.

“It is simply
unacceptable to have an average of one minister of sports a year for a
ten-year period. Look at the last Minister of Sports, he stayed for
just eight months and then jumped ship to pursue his political
ambition. Now, a new minister has been appointed. How can development
take place under such an arrangement,” says Dan Ngerem, a former
President of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN).

He says this situation coupled with the absence of a clear policy framework is “recipe for disaster”.

“We are not true to
ourselves. Nothing has really changed in the last ten years. Managers
of our sports have hidden under the umbrella of the deplorable state of
affairs in Nigeria to excuse their non-performance. I beg to disagree.
We could have done better and can certainly do better,” Ngerem said.

He noted that the way out of the morass that sports has found itself in the last ten years is straight forward.

“Government should
allow sports to thrive on its own. It is misleading and mischievous for
people to think that sports will die in Nigeria without government
funding. A few years ago we had a public -private partnership
arrangement, that’s talking about the Team Nigeria.

They killed that programme and did not put any in its place. We must
go back to it. The private sector is willing to inject money into
sports but is being held back by the lack of accountability and
transparency of our sports administrators.”