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In the course of discharging my duties as a sports journalist, I have come across people who have bluntly accused sports journalists of being responsible for the rot in the Nigerian sports sector.

I have often defended my colleagues and I, arguing that the charge is akin to holding political reporters responsible for bad leadership in the country.

After careful review of the situation, I have come to the inescapable conclusion that we are more than culpable. As journalists we are expected not only to faithfully report on society but to go a step further to hold those who activities we reflect in our media and whose activities impinge one way or another on the health of society, accountable.

That is where we have been remiss as sports journalists. That the different sports in Nigeria particularly key ones like football, boxing, athletics and basketball, which in decades past thrust Nigeria into global limelight, have atrophied right before our eyes makes us as guilty as the sports administrators who have through acts of omission or commission, run them down.

As watchdogs, we have not asked the hard questions but have preferred to cuddle the army of misfits and charlatans who have superintended our sports. We accept at face value the lies and half-truths peddled by these administrators instead of digging deep to unearth the truth.

It is for this reason that we find individuals not particularly distinguished either by sharp intellect or sound moral judgment building empires and carving out fiefdoms while the sports entrusted to them decays.

How else do we explain the matter of Habu Gumel and volleyball? How do you explain the fact that the man has spent the whole of eighteen years as President of the Nigerian Volleyball Federation and in the intervening period has been a member of the International Volleyball federation and the sport is dead in this country?

The only plausible explanation is because as journalists, we let him get away with it. Have we engaged him enough to tell Nigerians while he should continue in that position when his nearly two decades tour of duty has not been meaningful? Eighteen years in the life of an individual is a long time, long enough for him to record ground-breaking achievements. If there had been a modicum of seriousness on the part of Gumel, would Nigerian volleyball not have appropriated a spot in the commanding heights of the sport globally?

Anyway, this piece is not about Gumel.

It is about how we can pull sports writing from the mud into which our indifference and sometimes criminality, plunges it daily.

Re-inventing ourselves

We have come to the point where we must look ourselves in the eye and tell ourselves the truth and that truth as we are wont to say here in Nigeria is bitter. And it is that sports journalism is going to the dogs; it is getting alarmingly pedestrian with a new generation of practitioners who have neither the inclination nor the competence to faithfully discharge their duties. The situation in our profession has become like the situation in the banking industry where economic recession forced jobless graduates to seek to become bankers with a good many of them managing to squeeze themselves into banks and ultimately helping in the collapse of some of them.

While it is evident that there is still a crop of decent and professionally minded sports writers who are still able to challenge the rabid status quo with a view to bringing about a change in the way sports is run in this country, we have in the main, mercenaries and journeymen whose stock-in-trade is to massage the bloated egos of our for the most part, vacuous and mercantilist sports administrators. Given this, it is not surprising to see the clear lack of will on the part of most of us to see for instance, the crisis in Nigerian football come to an end.

While a good many of us like to reminisce about the good old days of Sunday Dankaro, Mahmoud Kadiri and Patrick Okpomo in football administration for instance, few are willing to exert the mental energy required to make the present superintendents of Nigerian football administer the game like these gentlemen mentioned, failing which we make things unbearable for them.

Looking at the profession today, it is hard to imagine that it produced brilliant minds like Fabio Olanipekun, Walter Oyatogun, Yinka Craig, Sunny Ojeagbase, Frank Ilaboya, Tayo Balogun, Chris Eseka, Robert Ndabai, Mitchell Obi,

Ejiro Omonode, Kunle Solaja, Ikeddy Isiguzo, Patrick Odili, Segun Adenuga to name a few of them.

We desperately need to do some soul searching; we need to re-invent ourselves for it is only by doing so that we can put ourselves in the position to help lift Nigerian sports from the morass into which greed and incompetence has plunged it by pointing the way forward through informed objective commentaries and analysis. To do otherwise would be to sentence sports to certain death.