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Team
Nigeria: The Parallel Of A
Failed Nation By Joe
Anwana When
the games of the 28th Olympiad got underway in Athens,
Greece, TEAM NIGERIA hoisted the banner of Nigeria’s hopes. Team
Nigeria represented the collective aspirations and yearnings of a nation
to stand out among the sporting nations of the world in the world’s
most glamorous and comprehensive sport fiesta. Team Nigeria carried the
burden of salvaging and redeeming national pride and dignity, quite in
consonance with the national image-laundering project of the Honorable
Minister of Information. Indeed, Team Nigeria was to be the common man
in Nigeria, a reminder of the remains of what could be a great nation.
Unfortunately though, Team Nigeria also basically represented and
explicitly mirrored the rot that is the Nigerian nation. Indeed,
the Athens 2004 Olympic games will go down as a bitter flop for Nigeria,
the worst of it in recent times. Even while the Olympic flame was still
burning and many nations were counting their medal hauls, Mr. Patrick
Ekeji, Director of Sports in the Federal Ministry of Sports and Youth
Development quickly attributed the apparent failure of the Nigerian
Contingents to “inadequate funding and other logistics”. I find it
very difficult to be impressed by Mr. Ekeji’s sincerity. The question
is, how on earth did we go into the “mother of all sports
competitions” without “adequate funding and other logistics”?. Who
do we hold responsible for such negligence and carelessness that has
resulted in a great national embarrassment and “discounting of
national image”, which is quite a disservice to the noble efforts of
our Honorable Minister of Information. CARRYING OVER THE WINNING MOOD? It
also appears to me that, apart from the above-cited excuses, Mr. Ekeji
has another to give to Nigerians. According to him, after Team Nigeria
beat all other African minnows to win the Abuja 2003 All African games,
“they” thought that the team will “carry over” the winning mood
to Athens 2004. Can you beat that? Somebody is contradicting issues in a
bid to cajole us to forget our sorrows. How
do we correlate funding and logistics with transfer of winning mood from
Abuja 2003 to Athens 2004? Can we even try to imagine athletes
incubating winning mood to deliver a year after, in another competition
of a completely different scale? Did we assume that African opposition
operates at the same level with world-class opposition? What a pity!!! The
expectation of bringing in 10 gold medals without a commensurate input
in terms of grooming and preparation symbolizes the entire Nigerian
system where there is no place for merit, where politicians win
elections without the people’s mandate, where winners are made losers
and losers become winners, a nation where golden packages are given to
the fittest brutes who are able to bull-doze through and meander the
corrupt route to the top. The 10 gold medal target setters may find it too disappointing to note that IOC doesn’t give gold medals to people because their parents were or are still influential and highly placed, it is also a fact that Olympic gold medals are not awarded by imperialistic and autocratic executive fiat which will later be ratified by a specially selected “Honorables”. It is also so disappointing that we don’t really have the right to amend the law regulating IOC to our favour, or to order by court injunction the conferment of 10 gold medals on Team Nigeria. RE-CYCLED LEGS It
would not have been possible for Nigeria to win medals especially in the
athletics events where the best of our hopes ran their best 10 years
ago. Old legs, tired and weary they fell like a pack of cards. We had no choice but to go to Athens with the familiar old legs because there are no replacements for them. That is the sad story of sports development in Nigeria, and that is the problem of the nation, recycling of leadership in the hands of men who are already spent. America indeed still dominated the track events even with the absence of the likes of Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Michael Johnson and others. Lucky
Igbinedion, Governor of Edo State thought N1m promise for each boxing
gold medal is the magic wand. But there is no magic. Do we have a
programme for talent hunt? How do we arrive at those who represent us?
As a teenager in the early nineties, I was a young member of the then
NABA Boxing Club under the tutelage of Coach Obisia Nwakpa, the club set
up by the late Brai Ayonote before his death was aimed at raising young
boxers that will be able to compete for Nigeria in the 1996 and 2000
Olympic. But the man died, and the vision died. Since then, what has
happened? Indeed, N1m is not enough to buy an Olympic gold medal in
Boxing!!! If
you ask me, the greatest embarrassment of the games to Nigeria is the
100m Silver Medal achievement of erstwhile Nigerian runner, Francis
Obikwelu, now of Portugal. Is this not how mismanagement of national
resources has generated massive frustration, which has led to the Nation
losing her best brains to other nations? Why
is it that we only attain our best outside the shores of the country,
what makes a Nigerian professional to become the best only after he has
traveled out should be investigated. Obikewlu indeed is a pride to
Portugal. I wonder how those that contributed to his exit from the team
felt when he raised the Portuguese flag after beating the great Maurice
Greene to pick the 100m silver medal. Obikwelu symbolizes a nation
grossly unable to harness its abundant resources, a country that exports
crude oil and imports refined products at outrageous cut-throat prices.
What a shame!!! The
drain continues, the desperation that follows the American Visa lottery,
and the unending queues at various foreign embassies is an attestation
of the unbearable state of the nation. My
postulation goes thus: until leadership in Nigeria begins to tilt
towards social responsibility as against the current emphasis on
commercialization, privatization, deregulation and all other economic
mumbo-jumbo currently in use, we will continue to celebrate exploits and
victories that looks like ours, but not really ours. In
conclusion, what should really be the way forward? Mr. Ekeji has the
answer again, “Back to the drawing board”. I will like to suggest
that “going back to the drawing board should be incorporated into the
National anthem, perhaps it will help us. Really we have been going back
to the drawing board so many times without actually drawing anything.
2008 Olympics will not be different and the nation will remain in coma,
politically, economically and socially except we go to the drawing board
and actually draw and carefully follow and “execute” the pattern of
the drawing. LETS
WAKE UP FROM THE DREAM!!! Joe
Anwana Lagos, Nigeria |