After the end of the civil war, National Sports Festival (NSF) was one of the Innovations introduced to bridge the then deepening wide gap in Nigeria. Apart from national cohesion, the National Sports Festival berthed to also plug the sports talent hole, as several athletes from the biannual event later made it to the top.
Started in 1973, the National Sports Festival began at the National Stadium in Lagos and it was a huge success as that year’s edition was organised with pomp. Tailored to be a biannual event, the Sports Festival suffered inconsistencies following several issues.
For example, the ongoing edition in Abeokuta, Ogun State, which started on Friday suffered a couple of shifts because Ogun State struggled to provide befitting facilities to ensure a seamless Sports Festival. That was the reason Abeokuta could not be used as a venue for the South West zonal elimination in order to test-run the facilities before the Festival proper..
Apart from that, the Festival might also have fallen short of expectations even from participating states as some of them couldn’t even attend zonal eliminations. This, for instance, explains why in Enugu where the South-eastern states converged for this year’s elimination, there were so many walk-overs. This type of unfortunate situation is no doubt as a result of the nonchalant attitude of some state governors towards sports.
Over the years, the National Sports Festivals which used to be a talent breeding ground has been bastardised to the extent that it no longer serves the purpose for which it was instituted.
For example, the Sports Festival has previously thrown up athletes that later made themselves and Nigerians proud in various international meets.
While the list is inexhaustible, Segun Odegbami, fondly known as “Mathematical,” is a proud product of the very first edition of the National Sports Festival, held in 1973 in Lagos. Representing the defunct Western State in football, Odegbami also featured in the 1975 edition of the Festival.
His outstanding performances earned him a call-up to the Nigerian national team, the Green Eagles. Odegbami went on to earn 46 caps and score 23 goals for Nigeria. He was instrumental in guiding the team to its first Africa Cup of Nations title in 1980.
Coming down lately, there was the Queen of the Tracks, Mary Onyali, who was first discovered at the Kwara ’85 Games; Falilat Ogunkoya, who would go on from the NSF to become the first Nigerian woman to win an individual Olympics track medal (at the 1996 Atlanta Olympic Games); Deji Aliu, a multiple-time African champion and World Cup medallist, and Chika Chukwumerije, the first person from Sub-Saharan Africa to win an Olympic medal in Taekwondo, and the first African Taekwondo athlete to compete at three Olympic Games. There was also Yusuf Alli, who represented Nigeria in 1980 at the Moscow Games, and at the Los Angeles 1984 and Seoul 1988 Olympic Games, among others.
Recently, there is also Nigeria’s Queen of the Jump, Ese Brume. Brume’s journey from local promise to international stardom began at the 2011 National Sports Festival in Port Harcourt. Competing then as a young and determined athlete, she finished sixth—but the experience sparked a fire in her.
By the 2012 edition in Lagos, Brume returned stronger and more focused, finishing second behind Nigeria’s track queen, Blessing Okagbare. That moment marked the beginning of her meteoric rise. Today, Ese Brume stands tall as one of Africa’s most decorated long jumpers.
There is also Patience Okon-George. Okon-George is another shining example of talent nurtured through the National Sports Festival. From her early appearances at the Festival, she grew into one of Nigeria’s finest quartermiler.
A two-time African Championships bronze medallist in the 400m and a three-time national champion, Okon-George has been a consistent force on the track. Her contributions to Nigeria’s 4x400m relay teams have earned her multiple continental golds, solidifying her place as a mainstay in African athletics.
Despite those giant strides and discoveries, the Nigerian version of Olympic Games seems to have lost its glamour and essence as recent editions have not been able to replicate past glories.
This is coming as the 22nd edition of the hitherto highly anticipated multi-sport festival kicked off on Friday in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital.
Meanwhile, several factors have plagued the National Sports Festival. Perhaps, prominent among the many challenges is the penchant of states to use elite athletes in a bid to gain medal advantage, a situation that has eroded the main essence of throwing up budding talents for future engagements.
Cecilia Arinye, a former International Table Tennis Federation (ITTF) Blue-Badged Umpire, once decried the use of elite athletes by the states in the National Sports Festivals, saying such practice is killing the essence of the Festival.
“The main objective of the NSF is to discover new talents and I strongly believe that bringing in elite athletes will not serve the purpose of the festival.
“A lot of us were discovered during the festival and we rose to stardom. There are lots of athletes at the grassroots yearning for recognition.
“The NSF is the major platform through which athletes are selected for the national teams,” she said.
Also, foremost sports journalist and administrator, Paul Bassey, also once noted that using top athletes for the NSF is very bad for the main essence of the Festival.
While delivering a paper titled: ‘National Sports Festival And Talents Hunt: Progress So Far, years back, Bassey traced the origin of the Festival to the recommendation of a three-man committee that was sent to West Germany in 1973, which on return, recommended a biennial National Sports Festival based on the principle of mass participation in sports throughout the country.
“The objectives of the festival were to promote mass participation in amateur sports from village level to the national level, to encourage the organisation of amateur sports competitions throughout the country in order to raise standards and to promote and strengthen friendship among sportsmen and women throughout the country.
“So using elite athletes is bad and will merely negate the purpose of this noble idea,” he said. He admitted that using elite athletes just because there is this penchant to win at all cost has continually cost the country opportunity to produce young athletes to replace the ageing ones.
Also identified as the major factor bedeviling the National Sports Festival is the recurrent appointment of administrators who know next to nothing about sports tenaciously clinging to office and remaining at the helm of affairs without implementing any sustainable programs, competitions or financing.
Speaking to our correspondent, a source from Nigerian sports hierarchy revealed that the menace of having the wrong people to manage the planning had been the bane of National Sports Festivals.
“We have similar situation when Edo State hosted it and even now, we have the same situation,” the source very privy to the ongoing festival revealed.
“Everything is shrouded in secrecy and that is why we have had to postpone this Festival for several times. The problem is that people are not truthful to themselves,” he said.
“Wrong people are the ones managing sports in Nigeria and are the ones thrust with organising events like the National Sports Festival which is very wrong.
“In the past edition, sporting facilities suffer from the national malaise of lack of maintenance culture because wrong people are handling the affairs.”
Corroborating the above, athough funding is central, it’s only a small part of the problem. Corruption is the bane of sports in Nigeria as it is with most government-controlled operations. These days, it’s the standard practice for sports officials to siphon money whenever funds are made available, leaving sportsmen and women poorly accommodated, underfed, underpaid and under-motivated.
SUNDAY INDEPENDENT gathered that sports administrators in various states do not effectively utilise funds to train athletes ahead of sports festivals, leading to poor outings. Such developments have led to disunity as official work at crossroads.
Modern-day sport isn’t only about unity, it’s about competition. There is nothing unifying about states not showing interest in sports and not bothering to train athletes but covering up by recruiting participants when the sports festival comes round instead of clear-cut plans to develop talents from primary and secondary schools, who would then feature in Sports Festivals.
Today, state administrators have relegated development of talents, preferring to poach already-made talents, to the detriment of the main essence of National Sports Festival.
The founding dream of the National Sports Festival was to organise a “national olympics” which would unite the nation’s youths in sportsmanship irrespective of sex, ethnicity, religion or social background. That this dream is now a mirage is very apparent going by recent Festivals which have failed to elicit optimism, failing abysmally to groom budding talents for the future.
The challenge threatening Nigerian sports goes beyond the National Sports Festival. The current state of local sports is so abysmal that the nation is now forced to rely on its diaspora sports persons. Regrettably most of them relocated to foreign shores simply to have access to healthy diets, elite coaches, world class training facilities, decent accommodation, and befitting remuneration, all of which enabled them to excel. There are serious concerns about government’s lack of commitment to sports development and concentration on international competitions for national pride and neglect of grassroots sports.
However, Governor Dapo Abiodun has assured that the ongoing Gateway Games would rekindle the reason for instituting the NSF.
“For this event, Gateway Games, we are going to be ready. Like everything in life most times when you are cooking it you don’t get to appreciate what it will taste like until it is ready.
“I want to assure that we have put everything into this. This goes beyond National Sports Festival; this is our first step into what is called the sport economy. Ogun State will now be tapping into that.
“What does the sport festival represent? To unite the country across state lines and to ensure that our youths develop talents, skills, leadership qualities and interpersonal skills because if you don’t do that there is a tendency for disunity.”
Reassuring as the word of the governor is, there is the need for the National Council on Sports to liaise with relevant stakeholders to come up with a sports policy that would be anchored on grassroots development.