It is too early in the New Year to be frustrated about anything. Unfortunately, a few days ago, I received a message from Ben, a parent of an old student of the school I founded, The International Sports Academy. It sent a shiver down my spine!

I am one of the loudest advocates of the combination of education and sports in Nigeria to the extent that I was made Ambassador of the 1-Goal Education for All project in Nigeria, I set up a secondary school to promote the cause of sports within academic institutions, I supervise the largest secondary schools football championship in Africa, and I have written about the subject of education and sports in my weekly columns more times than any other subject in my over 30 years of writing! It is needless for me to continue to state how important the education of every child is. I grew up at a time in this country when education was seen by every parent as the greatest gift they could give a child, and that the opportunity for a child to go to school was indeed a privilege. Now education has become the right of every child yet we have over 8 million youngsters that are not in school many of them choosing instead to pursue a career in professional football abroad!

In the past few decades sports have grown from being a pastime and a recreational and health activity to being major economic, political and social tools. But even then, the growth of sports does not in any way affect the prime place of education in our national life. Indeed sports add value to an educated mind, and provide limitless additional opportunities to those that can successfully combine them. I point this out to all students of The International Sports Academy. I draw their attention to the lives of those that successfully combined their academics with active sports, and compare their life to those that pursued sports at the expense of education. I then ask them to make a choice! That exercise has taught the students the useful lesson of how a few privileged humans have succeeded in living the best of two worlds by combining education with sports! It is really akin to eating their cake and still having it.

The International Sports Academy has successfully graduated two sets of students to date. The third set is preparing for their WAEC exams soon. My joy has been that no student of the school graduated and still chose to go abroad in pursuit of a professional football career instead of advancing their education. The school taught them to seek admission into tertiary institutions with a friendly disposition to sport. Many of them are now in Universities and Colleges of Technology around the country, sustaining their interest in sports and doing well academically. So, I have been feeling very good with our school records until early this week when I received the message Ben, the father of one of my former students that was already in a University, seeking my help to secure a professional club for his son abroad. I could not believe it.

How can this young 18 year old freshman abandon a university education now for the chance of success in the uncertain world of football abroad? It can only be the product of crass ignorance.

I am researching a piece of information passed to me recently by a British journalist friend. I shall publish my findings on this page when I confirm their veracity. The friend had told me that in the UK there is a growing concern about the number and fate of thousands of youngsters who are enrolled into professional football clubs at 18. Research confirm that by age 25 less than one percent of the overall number that join the professional football train succeed as professionals and play in one of the top clubs in England. The rest of the over 99 percent end up in remote clubs unsung and unsuccessful. They end up as dregs of the British society, uneducated, unschooled and unskilled! Yet that is a society that makes some provision for other opportunities that can be exploited to still live a decent life. Here, in the Third World, it is a life of disappointment and pain for the vast majority of youngsters that take to football. I know because I am in the system and appreciate whats happening. The statistics about the number that fail to get anywhere is staggering! So bad is the situation that no parent should allow their child to take up football as a career without first obtaining a minimum level of academic or technical training. So bad is the situation that parents that support children that choose to play football instead of going to school should be sent to jail. How many such children will be lucky and end up like Kanu Nwankwo and Jay Jay Okocha? For every one of these successful players there must be hundreds of thousands that fall by the way side. The chances of an average child interested in playing professional football becoming a ‘Kanu Nwankwo’ are like one in a million!

A cursory study of what happens even to those that succeed in going abroad reveals that most of them succeed in doing so by falsifying their ages. Most of them go abroad in their early 20s and claim to be a lot younger. They would have spent the 4 or 5 years after leaving secondary school looking for agents, local clubs, and even bribing coaches and administrators to help them secure a place in one of the junior national teams. For the vast majority these 4 to 5 years become wasted years! We have a whole army of such young men scattered all over the country languishing in the hope of a breakthrough that never comes.

I hope the parent that called me up reads this and puts back his thinking cap. Unfortunately, I know the son well. A great lad, well behaved and with potentials to succeed academically. His football is good too but he is just one of thousands of equally good players that cant find their way through this labyrinth. The secret to am almost certain successful life is to complete secondary school, spend the next four years in a university, collect a degree (all of this at less than 22 years of age), and then rejoin the professional football market with a higher sense of purpose, more maturity, and a better sports person! The benefit of having a degree comes across in the confidence that will ooze out of this player’s pores! It is important our sports authorities, particularly our football authorities, take their sports as a tool of social change in the country and recognise their own roles in the process.

Grassroots sports development must be driven through the schools system. No player in Nigeria’s junior national teams ought to come from outside the schools system. In short any one desirous of representing Nigeria at junior levels must come from school. Thats why a recent newspaper report I read a few days ago about Nigeria’s preparation for the African Youth Championship interests me. This is a championship for under-20s. I shall be looking out for how many of the players that Coach Obuh will invite to the national camp will come from schools and tertiary institutions. I have a feeling there will be very few or none at all. I pray I am proved wrong as any thing contrary will underline my frustration at the state of government’s responsiveness to the state of youth empowerment through education and sports in the country. The matter of sports and education has become such a serious social problem that the government can only pay lip service to it at the country’s future peril. It is a time bomb waiting to explode. Whole generations of uneducated young men will be unleashed on the country, the consequences of which are better imagined than experienced.

An Authentic Grassroots Sports Development

A genuine grassroots football development programme should actually start at primary schools level. But in Nigeria that has proven to be a difficult and daunting challenge. Primary schools generally do not have the facilities or personnel for football within them and provide little accommodation for football in their curriculum. Therefore, even from Nigeria’s past, we find that organised grassroots sports took place largely from secondary schools level upwards. Thats where we had the Davis Cup, the Grier Cup, the Academicals championship, Manuwa Adebajo Cup, Thermogene Cup, Principals Cup and so on. Thats why in the present maze of not-so-well-organised grassroots football programmes it is to the secondary schools that we must return to start our rebuilding process. Thats why, also, the All Nigeria Secondary Schools Football Championship for the NNPC/Shell Cup provides the country with one very useful platform to drive home the message and create a platform to practicalize it. The 2011 championship has started rather quietly in several parts of the country. I think that a little more interest should be shown by our football authorities to tap from the opportunity it offers. I am writing this only to point out how we can get the best from a championship that has continued to play a useful part in discovering talent and can play an even bigger role if well exploited.

Once again, I believe that the championship, for now, holds one of the keys to the grassroots football development of the country. Let me therefore elaborate more on the championship. Even with all its failings and abuse by some schools that still try to cheat or even cheat by using much older or none-bonafide students, it still is the most credible football development programme in Nigeria today. There is very little of organised football below the secondary schools level. The NNPC/Shell Cup Championship offers a platform for students in secondary schools to compete amongst themselves and to get the necessary attention from domestic club coaches as well as a few national team coaches to showcase their talent. Several players, through the years, have been discovered during the finals stages of the championship when more attention is being paid to the last 4 schools in the final rounds.

This means that thousands of players must have slipped through the net of discovery. They were never seen by national team coaches and would never make it beyond the single or few matches their school team plays and are, thereafter, knocked out! This army of young players are found mostly in the schools that fail to progress beyond the early rounds.