Now that the Olympic game is over, I want to use this opportunity to commend all the athletes and their coaches. It is a great honour to represent your nation, and a bigger one to do that in the Olympics. Sure, it is a disappointment that we did not bring any medal home, but that does not diminish the fact that these young people served the nation.
As a citizen of the Nigerian nation, I want to recommend to Mr. President to bestow a national honour on Rena Wakama, D’Tigress’ coach. Already, she has been recognized as the best coach of women’s basketball at the Paris 2024 Olympics, and Nigeria must cement her role. This woman demonstrated the power of leadership, coaching, mentoring, and inspiring the girls to over-achieve. Losing to the US women basketball does not diminish that accomplishment.
For all of us, you do not win the Olympics in a day. Those who will participate for China and USA in 2036 in certain games are already in the camp. It requires planning which for years now we have struggled with. Except Edo, Delta and Lagos, do we still have a working sports council in Nigeria? The days of Chioma Ajunwa, David Izonritei, Mary Onyali, Olabisi Afolabi, Fatima Yusuf, and many others happened, not because we recruited them from American colleges, but because Nigeria had a functioning sports council system in our state capitals.
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But over time, these athletes were left to fund themselves with no support, and the results are here. This must change; sports is a career and even though they do not have Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), etc to do strikes for better facilities and support, Nigerians must call these politicians to lead.
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Nigeria treats Sports the same way it treats Agriculture, neither is seen as a business, but rather some sort of social investment. It’s a country with massive youth unemployment, yet the industry that can easily take in a lot of youths across its vast value chain barely get a look in. What do we even care for? Nothing. With Sports, you create a lot of economic activities, and people will earn money. Look beyond trophies and medals and focus on the vast businesses that Sports bring, the trophies and medals come as bonuses, because humans by their very nature don’t like losing.
This country is very poor, yet we are not thinking hard about things that generate economic activities and create wealth. It’s why we waste excessive energy talking about corruption, because we have become so numbed that we don’t know how to make money, so we are left with complaints and miseries. With a robust Sports industry, our infrastructures would improve too.
What are we doing with all the kids we produce here? We cannot feed them, we cannot create platforms that will give them the opportunities to show their readiness to compete; but we still think we should be taken seriously. The most annoying thing is that we are shameless, and that seals it.