African elders always have a way of passing messages when things are not going right in their society. I stumbled on an anonymous quote which says that "Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter."
There comes a time when silence is no longer golden but a betrayal. This is why the silence of President Bola Tinubu over the poor performance of Team Nigeria at the recently concluded Paris Olympic Games is worrisome. Today makes it exactly a fortnight that the Olympic Games ended. Ordinarily, the Sports Development Minister, Senator John Enoh is expected to have briefed the president about the outing.
The only response so far from government is the cry from the sports minister himself who actually led the contingent to the Games but in the course of his appraisal, is now making excuses. Maybe because he knows very little about the sector, he was too excited when some federation presidents massaged his ego and promised him a number of medals in Paris.
If he was an expert, especially after being appointed three years after the Tokyo Olympics, he would have known when he heard that preparations for the Paris Games had not started that there was no way the expectations could have been met. Yet he believed that the projections were achievable.
With the performance that put Nigeria among the 115 countries that didn't win a medal at the Olympics, Nigerians were expecting that President Tinubu would have asked what happened. Or is the President's silence, which portends danger, the reason why Senator Enoh is making wild allegations against his critics? After accepting responsibility for the outcome of the outing, which is honourable enough, it was shocking the way he later accused those who criticized the poor performance of attacking him because he didn't take them to Paris.
According to him, "the stage after the Olympics has been very toxic and, at some point, it's not even related to the outcome of the Olympics. I find this sector a very toxic one with vested interests. People have long-standing animosity with themselves and they waited for the outcome of the Olympics to voice out their frustrations. Nigeria has failed in the Olympics before with nothing happening, but I have bee subjected to all forms of harassment," he lamented.
He concluded his lamentation with the wild allegation that there "are people who should know and they know, but they are deliberately mischievous and misleading either because they wanted the Ministry to include them in the delegation to Paris, and the ministry can't include the whole country to Paris." On record, 2024 Olympics is not the first time Team Nigeria have returned from the Olympics without a medal. No medal was won at the country's debut in 1952 in Helsinki, Melbourne in 1956, Rome in 1960, Mexico City in 1968, Moscow in 1980, Seoul in 1988 and the London 2012 edition, so Enoh was right in saying it's not the first time.
But he was wrong to say that in all past failures, Nigerians never reacted. The fact is that even in the Rio 2016 where Nigeria won bronze in football and the Tokyo 2020 Olympics where we got a silver in wrestling (Blessing Oborududu) and Long Jump bronze (Ese Brume ), the sports ministers at the helm then, Solomon Dalung and Sunday Dare were not spared by angry Nigerians who always expect their athletes to do wonders. President Tinubu's silence in the face of the Paris embarrassment is shocking to say the least. He needs to ask questions so that from the genuine answers he may get, the way forward could be plotted in readiness for 2028 or at best for 2032.
He could start by looking into what some critical stakeholders have postulated. That Nigeria needs to start taking sports as a serious business and not recreation. President of the Nigeria Wrestling Federation, Dr. Daniel Igali has said that government should be serious about funding sports and not competitions like it is currently doing. According to Igali, "What Nigeria does now is to fund Games like the African Games, Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games. Everybody wants to be at the Games because there is a lot of estacodes to earn.
What has been happening is that government doesn't fund activities of the federations. There is no way you can make commensurate success or progression in sports if you don't fund federations", he surmised. Good enough the sports minister has identified one area that needs to be fixed, that is administration. He talked about putting round pegs in round holes. The policy of foisting politicians or friends of government officials on federations they know nothing about should be discarded.
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Again we should ensure that when bringing people who have deep pockets and the right connection to attract sponsors to support government funding, they should also complement it with passion for sports. These administrators must have programmes ready for their athletes and ensure that funds are released early for them to start serious preparations.
It should be a thing of worry that Nigeria couldn't make the list of 91 countries that won medals at the Paris Games. After coming second behind Egypt at this year's African Games in Ghana, it is a shame that Nigeria wasn't among the 12 African countries that won medals at the Paris Games.
The more reason President Tinubu should invite someone like Dr. Igali who has seen it all, won everything, Commonwealth gold, World Championships gold and Olympics gold medal and is helping to replicate same thing in Bayelsa State today. Igali needs to brief him about what we are not doing right and which way we should go as a nation serious about real sports development.
