Solomon Nwoke
26 December 2008
THE First Vice President of the Confederation of African Handball (CAHB), Nigeria's Dr Lanre Glover has tasked newly appointed Chairman/Minister of the National Sports Commission (NSC) Engr Sani Ndanusa to appoint people who have genuine interest in sports to run the associations as the next election of the association board members approach fast.
Dr Glover who is currently the Second Vice President of the Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC) was alarmed at the rate at which sports in the country are taking a nose dive as a result of lack of genuine interest on the part of those who run the sports association.
The former president of the Handball Federation of Nigeria (HFN) could not hide his disgust at the poor state of the game of handball which at a time was one of the best three sports in the country.
He also urged Ndanusa to disregard the idea of picking some Governors to head sports association as they have too much work at hand to have time to run sports.
"No, I don't support the idea of governors running sports in Nigeria. No forget it, it won't work. I have never supported it at any stage, because if you look at the failure rate it was about 80 percent and that doesn't make sense in terms of evaluation.
Reason being that the Governors are too busy to have time to run sports association. They have more important task to do and the leadership is more important and as long as you have no leadership, you cannot get any activity. So it is a waste of time. The only Governor that was successful was Alhaji Bukar Abba Ibrahim of Yobe state. The National Sports commission should not embark on that nonsense anymore. I think they should forget it. Rather, they should allow the associations to evolve naturally.
For instance in handball, a national federation, the state associations can come to the centre and vote for their president. So if they watch him for four years and he doesn't perform, they throw him out until we get stability.
Speaking specifically on the way forward in handball, he said the problem of the sport has been that of absence of strong leadership.
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