Since the return to democratic rule in 1999, various sports administrators have furthered the age-long practice of constituting panels to probe the country’s failure in international sports meets. GOWON AKPODONOR reports that not much has accrued to the country, necessitating calls for a change of tactics.
Favour Ofili has been in the news lately for various reasons. Last weekend, the country’s current fastest woman stunned athletics buffs with a blistering 15.85s (2.0m/s wind) run to set a new world record in the women’s 150 metres.
The feat at the Adidas Atlanta City Games, which had a field that included such world beaters as United States’ Tamari Davis and Ashanti Moore of Jamaica, reminded the world of Ofili’s potential to rule the sprints, even amid man-made troubles that have dogged her in recent times.
Less than two weeks earlier, the former Youth Olympics medallist refused to submit her international passport to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) in protest of what she described as the federation’s unprofessional treatment of athletes under their care.
Ofili’s grouse was that Nigerian sports managers ignored recommendations made by a panel set up by the Federal Government to investigate circumstances leading to the omission of her name from the list of 100-metre runners entered by the country at the Paris 2024 Olympic Games.
Although then Sports Minister John Owan Enoh, who instituted the panel after the Olympics, was removed shortly after and, therefore, could not implement the panel’s recommendations, Ofili and some other athletics stakeholders were peeved that an issue of such magnitude was swept under the carpet despite the furore that trailed Nigeria’s shoddy performance at the Paris 2024 Games.
They lamented that the same officials fingered in the Paris misadventure were also given the responsibility of leading another Nigerian team to the World Relays in Guangzhou, China, which the country eventually withdrew from over visa issues.
Ofili’s case is one of many such cases that the country has dumped and moved on with no lessons learnt, or punishment meted out on culprits/erring officials.
Setting up probe panels to ferret out reasons for Nigeria’s dismal outing at most major sporting extravaganzas has become the norm. The country’s penchant for setting up probe panels after every sports “disaster” dates back to even before the current civilian dispensation. Generally seen as a fool-proof approach to identifying factors that facilitated the failed outings, as well as recommending ways that would lead to success in future competitions, the political class has found a way of making the outcome of such exercises fail to count.
That notwithstanding, the practice of trying to find out why and how things went wrong is not peculiar to Nigeria. For instance, following its failure at the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta, United States, the British government, in 1997, set up a committee to study why the country failed and recommend ways to ensure that such failure does not repeat itself.
The result of that investigation was the establishment of the principles of New Public Management (NPM) as a framework for ways in which Britain “governs” the complex array of organisations and agencies that are involved in the delivery of public services, including the governance of sport policy development.
The NPM also identified and analysed the realignment of ways in which the British government and its national sporting agencies “interact” with key “delivery partners” that are charged with implementing its National Sports Policy.
Consequent to that new governance structure, by the time the London 2012 Olympic Games took place, the United Kingdom had so restructured its sports development pattern that it shot up from the one gold, eight silver, and seven bronze medals that it got in 1996, to 29 gold, 18 silver and 18 bronze medals at the London 2012 Games.
On its part, since Nigeria failed to win a single medal at the London 2012 Games, the country has set up probe panels after every subsequent failure, but such has not resulted in better performances in subsequent Olympic Games or subsequent international sports competitions.
Since 2012, Nigerian sports has seen more than six panels set up to unravel the country’s poor outing at major championships, or to investigate major scandals at international meets. In most cases, like the London 2012 Olympics panel’s recommendations, which were seen as game-changing, the panel’s findings were disregarded by successive governments.
Nigeria’s case, according to experts, is an indication that the country’s problems are much more than what could be solved by fine literature.
Progressive civilisations put a premium on sports development, as countries like Brazil, Argentina and Egypt, which have similar economic trajectories and demographics to Nigeria, always thrive at major sporting events. Additionally, they have functional collegiate competitions where youths are recruited for their national teams.
A former Director General of the National Sports Commission (NSC), Dr Patrick Ekeji, once said that the bane of Nigerian sports is the penchant of every incoming administration to discard all or most of the things done by their predecessors to start their programmes, which would also be swept aside by their successors. He said that up till this moment, there are many reports in the NSC office gathering dust.
“Nigerian sports will be better if all these reports are aggregated and harmonised into one policy document to guide every aspect of the sector,” a former African tennis champion, Dr Sadiq Abdullahi, told The Guardian.
Abdullahi was a member of the National Sports Industry Policy Drafting Committee, whose mandate was, among others, to produce a “harmonised review of the 2009 National Sports Policy; the harmonised reports of the Stakeholder Engagement Sessions, and the report of the Inter-Ministerial Technical Session on Sports Development.
“It also recommended reports such as Antananarivo Recommendations for Sports Development in Africa; the Kazan 2017 for the development of sports in line with the UN SDGs; the UN 2030 Sustainability and case studies of other countries sports industry policies including Australia, Egypt, South Africa, England, Japan, Ireland, Kenya and Jamaica.”
The NSIP was expected to take care of most of the ills bedevilling Nigerian sports, especially the constant complaint of poor funding. Almost five years after the committee submitted its reports, the document has not become the working tool for sports administration that the initiators said it would be.
The last The Guardian heard of the NSIP report was that the president was yet to sign it into law. Aware of the futility of setting up committees to unravel the reason behind every failed outing and to “point the way forward,” a former African hurdles champion had made a passionate appeal to the Federal Government to avoid “wasting” resources on probe panels to unravel the country’s failure at the London 2012 Olympics.
“I will not subscribe to any probe panel,” he said. “As far as I am concerned, I have witnessed lots of probes, and they simply constitute an avenue for some people to make money. Several probes have taken place in this country, and after that, nothing happens.”
Amike, a former national record holder, added: “We should move forward because probing failure is a wasteful venture, and I strongly suggest that we just forge ahead. Athletes did not deliver, and all we have to do is invest more in our athletes to bring out the best in them… Our athletes need funds to train well. Without adequate funding, we will keep getting the same results. I want the Federal Government to put more funds into sports federations because it is the federations that breed the athletes, and decide who makes it to the national teams,” he said.
Setting up investigative committees or probe panels, according to former sprint star, Iruma Ogbonna, is a ploy by some administrators to divert attention from the main ills ravaging the sports sector. He said: “The question we should ask ourselves is, ‘Why do ministers set up panels to investigate misdeeds of their administration? Has any of the panels ever indicted any minister or government official? Some of these probes are set up to make us believe that the administrators are genuinely concerned and will punish those responsible for misdeeds, but in the end, it goes back to business as usual.”
However, while many view that the probe panels have not served the country well in the past, the author of the book Going Round in Circles, Godwin Kienka, said that some of the panels have led to positive changes in Nigeria’s sports. Kienka, who led the Sports Reform Committee set up by former Minister of Youth and Sports, Solomon Dalung, to reform the nation’s sports sector, said that the problem with Nigerian sports is that some individuals sometimes manipulate well-intentioned programmes to suit their selfish interests.
Kienka said that his recommendations instigated the opening up of the NSF to foreign athletes, who desire to represent any state that had impacted their development.
“I submitted that memo through Babayo Shehu to the then Minister of Sports, Bala Bawa Ka-Oje.
“What happened was that I broached the matter to Amos Adamu, who advised that I direct it to Babayo Shehu, who had the minister’s ears. The minister bought it, but trust our commissioners and advisers, who use the sports festival for other things, to try to scuttle it. They later settled for a 50-50 solution, which is a partial implementation of the idea. But when Solomon Dalung came in, he set up the reform committee, which I headed. He bought the idea as a whole.
“For instance, the idea that ministry workers should not be imposed on federations was implemented. It is not that these things are not being implemented. It depends on who is in charge.”
On the Ofili case, Kienka described it as a straightforward case, adding that the NSC should be courageous enough to close the case to everybody’s satisfaction.
“Ofili is a patriot who desires the best for her country. How can the same people implicated by the panel on her omission from the 100m race at the Paris Olympics be the same people calling the shots? That is wrong. She was not asking for anything personal. The athletes are the kings in sports, but some people do not understand that. She demanded an answer, and nobody has given it to her.
“The solution is that the NSC must be man enough to admit that they erred, apologise to Ofili and Nigerians, and promise that such things will not happen again. Grandstanding will not solve the issues.”
This concentration on finding faults instead of steadying the ship of Nigerian sports, according to the proprietor of Cable Sports Academy, Edwin Onovwotafe, will only ensure that Nigerian youths’ God-given talent and potential remain a huge waste.
“Nigeria is blessed with great athletes, but as things stand, it will take a miracle for them to turn their talents into medals at the Olympics if the current disarticulation in sport persists,” Onovwotafe told The Guardian.
The outcome of the 2024 Paris Olympics brought back the sad tales of the nation’s participation in the Games.
“Nigeria should revive the National Sports Festival, and restore the national meets in athletics, table tennis, basketball, handball, volleyball, and others. The country should sponsor athletes to universities overseas through scholarships and pay them training grants ahead of major competitions if the country wants to succeed in future competitions. I am saying this because by the time the John Enoh panel submits its report and another committee is set up to review it, the time to prepare for Los Angeles 2028 would be reasonably gone,” said Onowvotafe.
