Sports: Everything went wrong – Amiesimaka

Posted by admin Headlines Monday, January 2nd, 2012

CHIEF Adokiye Amiesimaka, a former Nigerian international and a lawyer, spoke with Chukwudi Akasike

NOT much was achieved in 2011 in Nigerian sports. What in your view went wrong?

I don’t think anything went wrong in 2011. I think everything went wrong before 2011. What happened in 2011 was just a culmination of bad decisions and perennial state of planlessness in the past. It is just that the chicken came home to roost in 2011. So, I don’t really think we should despair that we didn’t achieve high scores in 2011; we should rather accept the fact that we missed opportunities in the past to do those things we needed to do to enable us to attain and sustain consistency in high level performance. I see 2011 as a year of opportunity and not of despair because despair won’t take us anywhere. We should rather seize the bull by the horns; that is my attitude to it. Our football has sunk so low.

What do you think is the way forward?

What we should do now is to come to terms with our shortcomings. I have said it over and over again; for the umpteenth time. We have allowed a state of utter planlessness; everything has been ad hoc and there is too much immediacy to our expectations. There is this win-now spirit in us and for that reason, we indulge in cheating at age grade level and that is the most critical level because that is the stage you need to discover the players in their credible teen years before taking them through a process of training. That is their formative period… 12, 13, 14 years. But we are not doing that. We rather bring in 30-year-old men with all their developed muscles and bones to intimidate the lads from other climes and when we win, we think we are doing well. We are not; we are rather cheating ourselves. So I see 2011 as a year of opportunity. Now the tragedy will be if we do not seize this opportunity; this is where the despair should really come in. This may be a despair that will last for a very long time because we have gone so low.

As it is with football in the country, so it is with other sports. So whatever you say about football in Nigeria applies to every other sport. In fact, it really applies to every sector of our economy and our social lives. It is a national malaise. We don’t sit down and ask ourselves; where do we want to be in the next five years? How do we intend to get there? What are the resources at our disposal? The problem is that we want results immediately without planning. For an instance, we don’t need a sports ministry. We don’t need a sports minister. Left to me, we should scrap the sports ministry. Having a sports ministry and a sports minister tends to over-politicise sports administration. There is too much politicisation of sports administration and too little of professionalisation. What we need to do is to professionalise sports administration.

What will then replace the sports ministry?

The sports commission of course. Now, we have a sports commission in name only. There is no Act backing it up. I hear there is a bill in the National Assembly. But why are they not seeing it through? We need a proper National Sports Commission in place of a sports ministry and we need a sports commission chairman. The basic difference is this; with a sports minister, he (minister) serves at the pleasure of the President and he can be appointed today and thrown out the very next day. If you look at history, you will see that within the past 10 to 15 years, we have had many sports ministers. But a sports commission chairman will have a definite term of office like four to five years that is renewable. So he sees himself as being there over a period of time. His position, is so to speak, consolidated. He can plan for tomorrow and synergise with the Ministry of Education because that is where we have the schools and that is where we have the teenagers. In fact, we do not need age declarations and birth certificates. All you need to do is to go to the schools, look at the school records from JSS 1 and you can reasonably arrive at the ages of these participants. So the sports commission would synergize with the Ministry of Education and the Nigeria Football Association. Draw up a programme of development; you look at the school time and know when the schools will be on break and articulate a programme of development… keying in into these opportunities. That is how we should go about it and we should organise sports competitions all over the place on a continuous basis at school levels.

Looking at the school programmes, we can discover these talents in their early teens; 13, 14 and take them the process of training that I have talked about. From there, those of them that want to play professional football can be attached to professional clubs as it is done in other parts of the world. You browse the internet; you will see that virtually every superstar in Europe or South America went through that kind of process. Being discovered early, they are attached to a professional club and groomed like that. Those of them that don’t want to play professional football but just like football, as I did in my own case, can still go ahead with their academics and participate in sports but still key into the opportunities provided by the training programme. That is what we need to do. But we can’t do that with a sports minister who knows he can be thrown out the next minute; a politician who is thinking of his next office as it has been happening… I hear the last minister wants to contest an election in one state somewhere. You can see that at the time he was appointed, he probably had no plans for the sports ministry and now the person is looking forward to a bigger office in his state. That is not the kind of thing we want; we want a professional sports person. The person should not necessarily be a sports graduate, but somebody who has the disposition, knowledge, the inclination, the passion, and the time for sports.

The sports ministers we had overtime will just come there and want to win now so that he would say during my time, we won this and we won that. Afterall I am not sure I am going to be in the office up till next year, so why not just win something now. But that has not been helping us. Even when I talked about the National Sports Commission, I am thinking of a limited role for the commission. The national Sports Commission should focus on the provision of facilities; training centres, playgrounds, stadia and neighbourhood centres. We need them all over the place so that everybody from young lads to old people will have the opportunity of going for recreational activities. The sports commission can do that in partnership with the private sector. If they (Private sector) see that you are serious, of course, they will want to partner. All you do is to ensure that they get some leverage for their participation in the maintenance or management of these sports facilities. Now, we have a National Institute for Sports, which actually is a subsidiary of the National Sports Commission. That institute should be given more attention to engage in sports research and development, sports medicine, training of coaches, training of sports administrators, secretaries and so on. We don’t know what we are losing by not seeing beyond our noses. This is a massive industry. We are just too mentally lazy to sit down and articulate it.

I look at the 1979 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria; I cannot recall seeing any aspect of it that talks about sports. I don’t think the intention is to get government involved in sports as we are doing now, especially in the realm of professional sports because virtually all the clubs in our premier league are sponsored by government. I don’t think that is the intention of our constitution. You will see that the World Health Organisation itself has acknowledged that sports is a health-inducing activity and you know that government has a key role to play in the health sector, even under the constitution. So, government can now use that as an opportunity to focus on mass participation of its citizenry in sports as a health inducing activity. That is actually what serious governments in other parts of the world are doing. Take sports as a health-inducing activity for mass participation. That is the kind of limited role I expect the National Sports Commission to play and then leave professional sports to the private sector. Let nobody tell me that the private sector cannot do it; the private sector can. Let’s take football for an instance; five, six, seven years ago, the so-called Premier League was not getting more than 70 or N80 million per annum from sponsorship. By the time Obaseki came and left, the Premier League was getting about one to over N2 billion. You can see that the private sector will want to identify with the league once they see that it is credible. The private sector does not want to be linked with age cheats. There are so many multinationals that are partnering with the International Olympic Committee because of the credibility at that level. If we too can show credibility in sports, they (multinationals) are ready to partner. We don’t need to go cap in hand to government for money. That is the kind of role I am thinking of. If we begin to articulate a credible youth development, you will see that in the next 10 to 12 years, we may begin to have a consistently reliable senior national team.

Let us not deceive ourselves. We do not have the materials now to do well in 2014 or 2018. To build stars takes time. Even in our so called golden era; that is 1976, 1980, 1994 and 1996, you find that those teams were built overtime. In father Tiko’s time, the process of building that 1980 team began in1974/1975. I started playing in that team in 1976. I played my first game for my country at the senior level at the age of 19 against Benin Republic and we thrashed them 7-0. Today, I am sure that if we play against Benin Republic, we are not sure we are going to beat them. That is the state we are at now. That team (1980 Green Eagles) was built overtime. Westerhof came in 1989 and built his team overtime and really got it right in 1994. You can see that after Westerhof, we have stopped discovering players. Why is it that the first time you hear about a player in the national team is when you invite him from some far-flung countries; Turkey or Switzerland or some other place? Just because he scored a good goal, you invite him to the national team. Why is it that it is only at that level that you get to know of these players? It is wrong.

I give a lot of kudos to our athletes because there is actually no value added to their natural endowment. We allow our athletes to develop on their own. Take football for instance, you let them roam the streets playing street football without guidance. In their formative years, they just depend on their natural abilities; they grow with different kinds of attitudes and that is why you have attitudinal problems at the senior level. When they are already in their late 20s and early 30s, you say you are discovering them. How can you discover an athlete in his late 20s and early 30s? What kind of input are you going to make and if the athlete has any attitudinal defect, it may be too late to correct such defect. It is imperative that the discovery of talents has to be in their formative years. These formative years are early teens; 13, 14. There is no wishful thinking about excellence. You strive for excellence; you have to work for it. There is a scientific approach to the attainment of excellence and that is what we are not doing. What we are talking about is to pray that we win our opponent as if God is not on the side of our opponent. You may pray to God for both teams to avoid injury, but you must work hard if you want to win. I am confident that if we get our act together, we will get it right. Everybody acknowledges that we are so endowed. In fact, the western world is perplexed that we are where we are because we have everything to excel, but we are not excelling.

You can imagine the Mikel Obis and the Okochas and the Kanu Nwankwos, Finidi Georges and so on went to Europe and did so well. These are people that never had any kind of professional guidance even in their early years. Their counterparts in Europe look at them and say if you have this talent, what are you doing to develop you talent? That is why I am saying there is no value added to what we have.

President Goodluck Jonathan once directed that the national teams should be disbanded to give the country time to reorganize its football. But the President later changed his mind after much pressure on him over his decision.

Do you think it was right for him to have changed his mind?

Well, I think it was a mistake on his part. I gave him a 150 per cent support when he said we should go on sabbatical because we needed something to compel us to look inward.

-Punchwp_posts

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