Nigeria Content Online

On Thursday, Nigeria honoured her citizens, who in the estimation of President Goodluck Jonathan were deserving of it.

From the list, it
is clear that President Jonathan does not think highly of the sports
establishment because not one athlete or administrator made the cut.

Given recent
developments in our sports sector, it may be tempting to agree with our
president. However, that would be utterly misleading and a denial of
the contribution of our sportsmen and women to the burnishing of our
national image sullied by the criminality and incompetence of some of
the individuals that have been honoured by President Jonathan in this
latest act of national recognition.

Despite the
malfeasance that has characterised football administration in Nigeria
in the last one and half decades as well as the sheer mercantilist
inclination of some of our sportsmen, there have been flashes of
brilliance from the sports sector.

Therefore, when as
many as 186 Nigerians are honoured for their contributions to national
development and there is not one sportsman or administrator among them,
there is something wrong somewhere.

Missing the point

It means that
President Goodluck Jonathan has not been properly advised. I have often
said and will repeat it even at the point of sounding like a broken
record that in the last twenty years, Nigerian sportsmen have done more
to polish our darkened national reputation than the entire crop of
politicians and businessmen who have found their way into the list in
the intervening period.

We recall that at
the moment of our ostracism in 1996 by the international community
following the indiscretion of the Sani Abacha government, it fell on
our youngsters, Chioma Ajunwa and our U-23 men’s football team, to
restore national pride and international confidence following their
spectacular performance at the Atlanta 1996 Olympics.

Two years before,
the Super Eagles had won the Africa Cup of Nations for the second time
and went on to put on display at the World Cup in the United States a
few months later, the prodigious talent of Nigerian footballers.

These displays by
our sportsmen helped to focus international attention on other positive
vibrations emanating from Nigeria. They served to correct the erroneous
impression that Nigerians were only adept at defrauding foreigners via
advance fee fraud (419) in addition to having a bad government.

The youngsters who
accomplished those feats are still alive. While some of them have gone
on to accomplish great things in their careers and others have faded
into oblivion, memories of their efforts linger.

In 2000 at the
Sydney Olympics, sprinter Enefiok Udo-Obong anchoring Nigeria’s 4×400
metres team in the final race ran with the speed of a dynamo to win
Nigeria a silver medal, which later became gold after it emerged that
at least two members of the American team that won the race had done so
under the influence of performance enhancing drugs.

By contrast, many
of the men and women honoured on Thursday have brought nothing but
dishonour to our national image through acts of omission and
commission. From those who have tried to pilfer public funds but were
stopped dead in their tracks by watchful colleagues and an inquisitive
media to those who attained the highest reaches of power through the
unlawful overthrow of lawfully constituted governments, we have a
collection of individuals who deserve nothing but censure.

If President
Jonathan has decided to honour them, what about members of our Super
Falcons who despite the shoddy treatment repeatedly meted out to them
by successive administrations of the Nigeria Football Association still
managed to win laurels for this nation at international football
competitions.

Does Patricia
Etteh, one of the recipients of this year’s award measure up
internationally with Perpetua Nkwocha, winner of the African footballer
on the Year award on three occasions or Mercy Akide-Udoh, a former
winner of the award who was in 2005 named one of FIFA’s women’s
football ambassadors?

Encouraging initiatives

If qualification
for the award depended on age, perhaps the answer would be yes but then
as we know (at least I hope that is the case) qualifying for national
honours entails far more than belonging to the ruling party in the
country. It involves spending oneself sometimes even under the most
debilitating conditions, to ensure that Nigeria works or that
internationally it has a positive image. On this score, many in
President Jonathan’s present list fall short.

Currently, there is
a young Nigerian who is contributing to sports but going by our
peculiar way of doing things may not even get a pat on the back let
alone hope to be honoured someday.

Yomi Kuku is
passionate about getting sports in Nigeria working again. A journalist,
he got tired of writing about the ills in Nigerian sports and decided
to do something about it. Today he runs Search and Groom, a
Non-Governmental Organisation dedicated to giving young footballers at
the grassroots opportunity to express themselves.

For the past four
years without support from the Nigerian government, he has been leading
young Nigerians to the Homeless World Cup. Only recently, during the
2010 FIFA World Cup in South Africa, he led the Nigerian contingent to
the Football for Festival organised by FIFA. Nigeria finished runner-up
to Kenya.

While in South
Africa, they were treated like outcasts by Nigerian football
authorities despite the fact FIFA Secretary General had written to the
leadership of the Nigeria Football Federation to offer them financial
and logistics support.

Nigerians like Kuku
deserve a pat on the back. Encouraging them would spur other Nigerians
into exploring ways of contributing to national development instead of
waiting on government for initiative all the time.