There are many things on my mind this week.

I was in Abuja at the head of a delegation of members of the Nigeria Academicals Sports Committee, NASCOM, to submit the Master plan for the revival of sports competitions amongst secondary school students in Nigeria. This is an initiative of the President, Dr. Goodluck Jonathan, to restore the tradition of Academicals in the country. In 1960, the Nigeria Academicals Football championship (later called the Manuwa /Adebajo Cup) was introduced and for over two decades it promoted inter-secondary school, inter-regional, and inter-state competitions that threw up a large number of talented football players, many of who eventually played for the country’s various national teams. At that time the tradition was restricted to football only even though other sports also had their own various regional and national competitions that were not called Academicals. The vision now is that the football academicals be restored, as well as 10 other sports, to start with, as a deliberate national programme to stimulate the return of sports to all schools, high level of competition amongst the best talents, and a feeder to higher institutions and the country’s national teams. In short, the issue of grassroots sports development is being addressed through the schools system!

It is a huge challenge particularly with the degradation in facilities, infrastructure, funding and even the training of sports teachers in schools. Higher institutions have also not helped matters by not making sports education and practice a major plank of their intra- and extra-curricular activities.  I was reading through an athletics publication the other day, a meets programme in the United Arab Emirate. There was a section in the publication that listed current and past world records set by individuals and teams in various athletics events.  In some events, particularly the sprints and relays, I observed that many of the records set through the years and some of the best ten records in history were accomplished by university athletes and institutions in America. The foremost sports country in the world depends almost entirely on its collegiate system to produce its best in all spheres including sport. In Nigeria, we had such practice up till the early 1980s. Since then what we have had has been a litany of woeful experiences;  stories of students being victimised for daring to devote any time to sport when there is the more ‘important’ issue of their studies.  This mentality pervades most tertiary institutions, a total lack of appreciation of the value of sport to health, wealth, education, social interaction and even image building. Most tertiary institutions either victimise their athletes or just simply neglect them. Only one or two have demonstrated some degree of commitment to advancing sports as a serious social tool within their campuses. Time was when sportsmen and women were given concessions in admission, and preferential treatment in hostel allocation and scholarships for those that excel.

Turning things around would require a revolution – an uncommon sagacity, the political will and commitment of governments and all the agencies that have to do with education, women, youths and sports! Establishing such a synergy without any or all of these elements is the main challenge. Fortunately, that is the verve that I see in the President Jonathan’s vision and recent actions in youth matters. You cannot address the issue of education and of youths without considering the role sport can play in tackling the problems associated with them. We must start to see sport and its impact on society beyond recreation and physical activity. We must appreciate sport for its capacity to provide platforms for enrolment in school (to meet the Millennium Development Goal project target of 2015), retaining students in school, giving students the opportunity for higher education and learning, and shepherding them into various careers that abound in the general entertainment business that includes tourism, hospitality,  social inclusion, the arts, job creation, and related business activities. The more I think about it the more I realise how much we are wasting the opportunities that sport and the arts in particular provide. Yet, these two areas are like Siamese twins that are least appreciated by successive governments, even though between them they can absorb the huge population of our youths that are at the bottleneck zone of our youth empowerment – that space between completing secondary school and the life after that.

There must be a new orientation to a complete education for our youths, plus a marriage of thoughts, purposes and programmes between the various agencies dealing with their affairs.

The NASCOM master plan was handed over to the Minister of Sport, Professor Taoheed Adedoja, at a low level event at the Federal Secretariat, Abuja. The quiet around the secretariat was a direct product of the preparation by Ministers to handover the affairs of their ministry to their Directors-General with the imminent dissolution of the Federal Executive Council. For several ministers the romance with the present government will be over. There will be a few lucky ones though, and the feeling around the sports ministry is that Professor Adedoja will be recalled based on his credible performance in the very few months that he has been in office!