At an air force base in Crete somewhere in America, pilots seat in the cosiness of air-conditioned rooms, remote controls in hand, fly drones over the skies of Afghanistan shooting down enemy troops. This may sound like science fiction or a scene from an action movie, but it is the reality today. The world is a changed place and the rate of change is so fast that man, with the help of science and technology, is actually venturing into uncharted and once unimaginable territory.

I am back from the Beyond Sport Award. I have been refined by the education I received through the experience. I am both frightened and excited about the changing face of the world. Even as I am catapulted into the reality of the 21st Century, I try to look back at the world of sports I knew and how things used to be even as little as ten years ago, and I marvel at how fast and far things have changed and are still changing. A whole new world sports order is in process driven by advancement in communication and the means of communication. Both have impacted the world in ways that leave most of us products of the ‘good old days’ bewildered. Television, the internet and the telephone have all contributed in bringing the world into our living rooms and have become so commonplace that we take them for granted and hardly stop to think of the quantum leap man has made from the days when Nigerians watched only one match of the English Premiership on television once a week (called Match of the day), covered by three television cameras and relayed on a delayed transmission to the present day when one cannot keep track of all the live matches each covered with a minimum of about 28 cameras! Time was when professional football was alien to most parts of the world outside Europe and football players were paid a few hundred pounds a year. Time was when the World Cup finals were alternated between two continents and the Cup monopolised by them too. Time was when only one African country represented the African continent. Things have truly changed. Today, there are as many cameras covering one Premiership football match as there were to cover the whole of the Premiership. Today the transfer of players has become another ‘game’ where the fee one player commands may be higher than the entire transfer fees for all the players in the Premiership a few decades ago! Even the balls and the turf on which the game is played these days have undergone major scientific alterations.

These changes continue to impact the world in a lot of ways. Two weeks sojourn in the UK and my interaction with players across the global spectrum of the sports industry have left me with a fuller and fresher appreciation of the power of sports to impact the world and change it for good!

I have been at international conferences, seminars, workshops, trade fairs, meetings and competitions for many years but have not seen and experienced the sort of excitement around sport as I did these past two weeks. One of the greatest achievements of the 21^st Century must be the global awakening to the power of sport as a tool not only for the promotion of sport itself but for its use as a as an instrument to drive social engagement and community development! Taking sport beyond the realm of sport is the biggest revolution in the history of sport in my reckoning!

Lewis Pugh swam for one kilometre in the sub-zero degrees waters of the North Pole and was numbed for four months after that to draw the attention of the world and that of his government to the effect of global warming and the rapidly shrinking polar ice caps. For Pugh’s effort British Prime Minister Gordon Brown has now committed the government to reducing his country’s carbon emission from 60% to 80% by 2050! In Venezuela, Project Alcatraz is a project that uses the game of rugby to reduce crime and transform violent leadership of youth offenders into virtuous leadership. The project has resulted in 65% reduction in crime, and close to 88% reduction in homicide in the area! Within Botswana in Africa is a project that aims to drive conservation and wildlife messages, using football to teach children an understanding and respect of their environment and the animals and plants that flourish there. The twinned Peace Sports schools project is one that uses basketball and football to pair 2000 Palestinian and Israeli children from neglected and peripheral communities in a region where so much strife has occurred through the millennia, in a series of joint activities in a ‘safe space’ between them. Through sports they freely engage with one another! There are many more such intriguing projects using sports as a tool to drive causes and major social development missions that are massively impacting the world that were presented at the Beyond Sport summit in the UK. For many of us participants it was affirmation of our collective vision to make effort to make little contributions to our environment, and assurance that we are not working alone, that we are being observed. It was fuel in our pits! We left the summit fired to extend the scope of our projects and expand our dreams.

Even as participants departed it was not without one of us kick-starting what I believe might become the ultimate use of sport. As Steve, winner of the most courageous use of sport award, proposed that during the 2010 World Cup in South Africa, all world governments should be challenged by FIFA to call for a global truce for 90 minutes, when all wars and conflicts around the world would stop! Ingenuous! That was the original mission of the Olympic movement - to use sport as a peace weapon. The idea was to call for a global truce during the Games when all conflicts and wars would stop and the opportunity used to sustain peace!

At the summit Steve was calling on the world to remember the original objective of sport and use the power of its passionate followership to make man to halt all fighting! Will FIFA take on the challenge? It seems ambitious but if the changes that have happened to the world are anything to go by Steve’s idea may not be a pipe dream after all!

I am challenged to take it one step further. I shall join with others of like mind to challenge FIFA to get governments around the world to extend the period of this global truce from 90 minutes to the entire period of the World Cup!

Setting new targets and challenges

I have a document before me as I write this. It is an endorsement by FIFA of a new project called 1 Goal whose mission is to use the 2010 World Cup to promote education of children in the world. This has never happened before. A major revolution is in the offing! FIFA and education? Football and education? Imagine how this will impact the game around the world! I am excited. It will affect the Under-27 championship and its participants. It will definitely help reduce age cheats at that level. Think of it. Is this not what several of us have been propagating through the years in Nigeria? Is this not what the NNPC/Shell Cup championship involving over 60,000 Nigerian children every year is all about? The missing ingredient has been an open support and promotion of education and football by governments and the football Confederations. Yet, this has been the greatest hindrance to an authetic grassroots football development in most of the third world – age falsification! Football should not be a shortcut to success for our youths. They must not make the streets rather than our schools the production room of great sportsmen and women.

I am so excited about this development I have now drawn up fresh challenges and new goals I shall now start to pursue.

1. By the time the bids for the 2018 and 2022 World Cups would be considered the world of football would be very different from what it is now. Sepp Blatter would no longer be President of FIFA. Even if he is, I can see that the present FIFA Executive is already changing its mind about joint bids for the World Cup and is considering accepting a joint Netherlands, Belgium bid for 2018. My proposal is that Nigeria should start to prepare to bid for the 2022 World Cup and organise the first regional World Cup along with its closest 4 neighbours on the West African coast. It will have one local organising body (Nigeria) but several venues along a borderless West coast.

2. The National Sports Commission is taking on too many responsibilities in the development of sports in the country. It should shed a lot of that weight to the States. As a first step I shall advocate that it should return all stadia outside Abuja to their original State owners. It should keep only the Abuja stadium with all its facilities for the training and competition of elite athletes that would be its only responsibility! It can set up zonal offices without taking up responsibility for maintenance of any major facilities. They don’t manage and utilise the stadia under them now maximally and this spreads the limited funding too thinly. Let the States and local government take up responsibility for grassroots sports through the schools only!!!

3. CAF and FIFA must challenge all governments in the World to give the people of the world the opportunity to celebrate their passion in safety and in peace by calling on all governments to observe a month of global truce from all conflicts and wars during the period of the World Cup! CAF can kick-start it by calling on all warring parties, militants, governments, tribes, and communities to observe a month of a truce during the period of the African Cup of Nations so that all Africans will watch the championship in peace. That period may just be enough cooling time for some resolution to be worked out!

4. CAF and FIFA should make a declaration that only players who are actually in school can take part in its competitions under the age of 17, put measures in place in enforce this and punish severely those that flaunt it. Although this may not eliminate age cheats it will reduce the practise and make watchdogs better equipped to tackle the menace!

5. All sports academies with the intension of trading in players must be registered with national sports associations and must be institutionalised and have an academic or vocational arm to empower the footballers beyond the game!

· These are my fresh challenges! Any joiners?