Ten years of underachievement
By Nnamdi Okosieme
January 2, 2011 07:18AM
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The decade that began in 1990 and ended in 2000 was a period of boon for Nigerian sports.
In that period, which had begun rather tamely with the country winning a bronze medal at the 1992 Africa Cup of Nations in Senegal, Nigeria went on to record its biggest sporting successes on the international sporting arena.
In football, Nigeria’s senior men’s football team, the Super Eagles became one of the most feared teams in world football after winning the Africa Cup of Nations in Tunisia in 1994 and wowing spectators with its delectable brand of football at the World Cup where it narrowly missed out on a quarter-final berth after falling 2-1 to Italy. It finished the year ranked the fifth best team in the world.
Two years later, Nigeria’s U-23 men’s football team shocked the world at the Atlanta 1996 Olympics when it scalped world football powers, Brazil and Argentina on its way to winning gold in the football event.
Years of triumph
In the 1990s, Nigerian athletics, which had been flowering in the 1980s with the exploits of athletes like Innocent Egbunike, Chidi Imoh, Mary Onyali, Olapade Adenekan, Ajayi Agbebaku, Falilat Ogunkoya, Fatima Yusuf, Adewale Olukoju and the Ezinwa brothers, Davidson and Osmond, reached its apogee with Chioma Ajunwa leaping to gold in Long Jump at the Atlanta Games on August 2. That medal, which came twenty-four hours before the gold in men’s football, marked the first time Nigeria would be winning a gold medal in its forty-four years of participation at the Olympics.
Atlanta was to prove a watershed for Nigerian athletics with our athletes winning a total of one gold, one silver and two bronze medals. It was arguably our best outing at the Olympics. The closest we have come since was at the Sydney Olympics where we won one gold and three silver medals, the gold coming by default after the United States of America, which beat Nigeria to the gold in the men’s 4x400m had the medal withdrawn following revelations that some of its athletes who competed in that race had used performance enhancing drugs.
Duncan Dokiwari’s bronze medal in Men’s Super Heavyweight boxing event at Atlanta completed a memorable Olympics for Nigeria, its best performance in four decades and the best overall since.
The 1990s ended with Nigeria winning one silver and one bronze medal at the 1999 edition of the Athletics World Championship, which held in Seville, Spain. Glory Alozie grabbed the silver in the women’s 100 metres hurdles while Francis Obikwelu coasted to bronze in the men’s 200 metres. Both athletes were to dump Nigeria for Spain and Portugal shortly after.
Downward spiral
If the decade that ended in 2000 had been a glorious one for Nigeria sports, the one that has just ended cannot be said to have been altogether successful for the country. While there may have been spurts of brilliance and achievement by Nigerian sportsmen and women, the nation’s overall impact in global sports diminished considerably.
In athletics, Nigeria, which used to hold its own against world powers like the USA, and Britain found itself playing catch up with countries like China and Japan, which were once considered outsiders.
At the Athletics World Championships for instance, Nigeria has failed to land a single medal since Alozie and Obikwelu put us on the medals table in 1999. The stark reality is that Nigeria, which between the first edition in Helsinki, Finland in 1983 and the Seville edition in 1999 chalked up three silver medals and two bronze, has failed to get on the medals podium in the last five editions.
By contrast, African countries like Kenya and Ethiopia which are considerably poorer than Nigeria in terms of financial resources and pool of talent, have between them won 79 medals in the last five editions with Kenya recording 15 gold, 14 silver and 14 bronze medals and Ethiopia chalking up 13 gold, 12 silver and 11 bronze medals. It has been the same story at the Olympics. Since 2000 Nigeria has only won two bronze medals in athletics both of them coming in the relays at the Athens 2004 Olympics.
In football, the story has been worse. Nigeria, which in the mid 1990s exerted continental dominance in football and was dreaded globally, lost its pre-eminent position in Africa and became cannon fodder for teams outside the African continent. Its senior national team, the Super Eagles in the last four editions of the Africa Cup of Nations managed three semi-final finishes and a quarter-final ouster at the 2008 edition in Ghana under the guidance of German coach, Berti Vogts.
Drain pipe
The Eagles performance reached its nadir at last year’s World Cup in South Africa where it failed to advance to the second round of the tournament despite being presented with a golden opportunity to do so. That performance rankled Nigerians and led to calls for the disbandment of the squad.
While exact figures cannot be produced, it is obvious from amounts bandied in the media as having been spent on preparing the team for tournaments that the Super Eagles have cost Nigeria billions of naira in the last ten years with little to show for it.
“The Eagles have not justified the billions spent on them. The last time we won something good… was in 1994 when they won the Africa Cup of Nations and played at World Cup in the USA. All they have given us in the last 16 years have been bronze medals,“ said Harrison Jalla, President of the National Association of Nigerian Footballers (NANF).
At club football level, the game has remained rooted in mediocrity with maladministration making nonsense of efforts by footballers playing on the local scene, to put up decent performances.
Today, eleven years after the professional league kicked off not one single club is privately owned. All of them with their managements largely controlled by cronies of the governors whose states fund them, struggle with the payment of players’ salaries and allowances.
Internationally, these clubs struggle to make an impact in continental club competitions with our biggest achievement at club level in the last ten years being Enyimba FC of Aba’s back to back victories in the Confederation of African Football (CAF) Champions League in 2003 and 2004. Sadly, that club, which made around $2 million from those victories, finds it difficult today to pay players’ wages and allowances.
That should hardly be a surprise anyway given that even the Nigeria Premier League (NPL), the body saddled with the task of ensuring the league runs smoothly, is itself far from organised. It has been unable to justify the N3 billion sponsorship fund meant for running of the league. At the moment, the body is mired in crises with its leadership being fired last week by the executive committee of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) following its inability to resolves the conflict emanating from its election into office. Aside, the sack of its leadership, the NPL is coping with two cases in court, one instituted by it against former league sponsors, Globacom over the latter’s refusal to release the last batch of funds under its sponsorship agreement and the other instituted against the NPL by Globacom for handing rival telecommunications company, MTN, league sponsorship rights three weeks ago.
Generally, Nigeria’s saving grace in football in the last ten years has been the performance of its women.
Despite being repeatedly treated shabbily by Nigeria’s football managers, Nigerian ladies have remained a source of pride to the country. The Super Falcons, our senior women’s national team, has dominated women’s football in a way that no other team on the continent has. Of the five editions of the Africa Women’s Championships, which held in the last ten years, the Falcons won four-2000, 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2010 - making them the undisputed leaders on the continent.
More blues
Aside football and athletics, there was marked decline in other sports with Nigeria ceding authority in events like boxing and table tennis, which in the past had earned it global renown. In boxing, the exploits of former professional and amateur pugilists like Dick “Tiger” Ihetu, Hogan “kid” Bassey Nojeem Maiyegun, Obisia Nwankpa, Abraham “Assassin” Tonica, Hogan “ Atomic Bomb” Jimoh, Joe Lasisi, Eddie Ndukwu, Tony and Davidson Andeh, Billy Famous, Dele Jonathan, Peter Konyegwachie, Christopher Ossai and Jeremiah Okorodudu etc, failed to inspire a new generation of fighters to glory.
Our performance in the sport in the last decade has been abysmal to say the least, reaching its lowest at last year’s Commonwealth Games in India where our boxers were battered to submission in all their bouts. Rather than return from the games with medals as was the case in previous competitions, our boxers and officials came back empty-handed engaging in recrimination and counter recrimination.
In table tennis, our players also lost considerable ground with most of them dropping out of the international ranking system; the same was the case for tennis.
A harvest of ministers
One of the factors responsible for Nigeria’s decline in global sports has been identified as the instability of leadership in the sports establishment coupled with what observers see as the lack of properly defined structures and functions for the National Sports Commission, which despite being the country’s sports governing body, is not backed up by an enabling law.
Figures show that between 2000 and 2010, Nigeria had a total of 11 ministers of sports- Damishi Sango, Ishaya Mark Aku, Steven Akiga, Musa Mohammed, Samaila Sambawa, Bawa Kaoje, Abdulrahman Gima, Alhassan Zaku, Sani Ndanusa, Ibrahim Bio and Taoheed Adedoja.
With eleven ministers taking charge of the sports ministry in ten years, the articulation of long term development strategies have proved difficult. Matters have not been helped by the fact that the bulk of the ministers had practically no understanding of the terrain into which they had been thrust and had absolutely no desire to learn on the job. This coupled with a clear absence of administrative acumen on their part meant that no meaningful development could take place. These ministers who were largely loyal members of the party in power at the federal level of government were thus open to manipulation by crafty career civil servants who had spent decades in the ministry and knew how to “tweak” the system for their benefit.
“It is simply unacceptable to have an average of one minister of sports a year for a ten-year period. Look at the last Minister of Sports, he stayed for just eight months and then jumped ship to pursue his political ambition. Now, a new minister has been appointed. How can development take place under such an arrangement,” says Dan Ngerem, a former President of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN).
He says this situation coupled with the absence of a clear policy framework is “recipe for disaster”.
“We are not true to ourselves. Nothing has really changed in the last ten years. Managers of our sports have hidden under the umbrella of the deplorable state of affairs in Nigeria to excuse their non-performance. I beg to disagree. We could have done better and can certainly do better,” Ngerem said.
He noted that the way out of the morass that sports has found itself in the last ten years is straight forward.
“Government should allow sports to thrive on its own. It is misleading and mischievous for people to think that sports will die in Nigeria without government funding. A few years ago we had a public -private partnership arrangement, that’s talking about the Team Nigeria.
They killed that programme and did not put any in its place. We must go back to it. The private sector is willing to inject money into sports but is being held back by the lack of accountability and transparency of our sports administrators.”