Opinion: Sports minister’s earthquake Super Eagles’ magic

Posted by admin Headlines, Soccer, Sports, Uncategorized Thursday, February 21st, 2013

FEBRUARY 22, 2013 BY ’TUNJI AJIBADE([email protected])

There is a need for two standing ovations. One is for Nigeria’s Minister of Sports, Bolaji Abdullahi. The other is for the Super Eagles. Mallam Abdullahi’s should precede that of the Eagles. It’s because earlier on the minister had championed something, before the Super Eagles championed something else, winning the Africa Cup of Nations. One needs to go soft on the Eagles though. Accolades had poured on them like a flood. More will cause even an eagle that’s super to go underwater. And it’s not right for an eagle to go underwater. The point shouldn’t be left unmade however that Super Eagles gave Nigeria the last laugh. The Confederation of African Football had ignored Nigeria that was in the first line for consideration for the hosting of the football fiesta, after Libya failed to make good its hosting right, and gave the same right to South Africa. Now, the Super Eagles had ignored CAF, as well as critics that had said, “Nothing for Nigeria,” by bringing the cup home. Football authorities here should take note of that, and concentrate on presenting national football teams that can win wherever the game is hosted. It’s better not to host but win, than to host (with so much resources expended) and lose.

Now, this writer had thought what the sports minister did earlier on amounted to an earthquake: “We are withdrawing all the secretaries back to the secretariat,” Abdullahi had said, while explaining the contents of the National Sports Commission bill that is before the lawmakers. And he had added: “Let the federation appoint their own secretaries.” He meant sports federations. Anyone who doesn’t appreciate the hold government has had on sports administration may not get the full implication, but with this step, the minister has done the unthinkable, sending entrenched and selfish interests in the nation’s sports administration out of business. Civil servants who pretend they are running sports as secretaries of sport federations belong to this category. They are a link by which the Sports Ministry chains the federations. Now that the sports minister has a plan to set the sports federations free, it’s important to check what damage this administrative chain had done to the nation’s sports; a necessary endeavour in order to appreciate what the new regime means.

Placing civil servants as secretaries of sports federations is an age-long practice. The reasons proffered range from maintaining institutional memory, to proper keeping of records. But it also means keeping each sports federation whose members are elected under the hands of government ministry. That raises issues. It makes federations dependent on government, an excuse for them to rely basically on budget allocations, which civilians are interested in anyway. So the job of developing federations and developing talent for each sport is never really done. The secretaries are used to perpetrate all sorts of funny schemes to ensure that only those in the good books of the ministry get into each federation. That means really qualified practitioners with ideas on how to move each sport forward, and with needed international connections, are schemed out. With a black belt in taekwondo and an Instructor’s Certificate in the same sport, this writer had witnessed all of that first hand as a practitioner in the years past.

And there is the angle which ensures that whatever funds federations have are mismanaged. Did anyone notice how the nation’s Premier League failed to have sponsors for two consecutive seasons, how former sponsors withdrew, and one of them, Globacom, now runs its own football academy? Was anyone aware of the allegations of corruption, of which letter the sports minister was served late in 2012, and which riddle neither the Nigerian Football Federation nor the Nigerian Premier League members had been able solve till date? Smart Globacom, the mobile telephone company, didn’t make much noise about funds that league administrators could not account for, rather it quietly withdrew and hand over its football projects to professionals, ex-internationals such as Segun Odegbami, Victor Ikpeba, Tijani Babangida, all of whom had brought smiles to faces of football lovers as they ran the Globacom football project the manner it should be run.

The so-called secretaries of sports federations have become principalities in themselves. The sports ministry, in the past, had used them to lord selfish interests of individuals in the ministry on the way of the federation. Within the ministry itself, getting to become a secretary is a lucrative business, highly sought after. They celebrate the fact that they are the ones selected to follow athletes for competitions outside the country. It’s become a matter of personal aggrandisement, not the interest of the athletes that do the sweating. Now, the sports minister has said if any federation needs to recruit good hands, technical persons, secretaries inclusive, from anywhere in order to ensure it delivers on the nation’s expectations, the federation should go and get them. That links back to the matter of Performance Contract Agreement the minister signed with sport administrators late in 2012. He had said such was in line with President Goodluck Jonathan’s directive that performance appraisal contract be signed by all cabinet ministers.

In the event, the minister stated that the exercise has become imperative to enable the National Sports Commission to capture its specific mandate to Nigerian citizens. Nigerians expect government to be more proactive and effective in its actions by providing the enabling environment that will enable sports federations to function more effectively, he had explained. Well said. Countries that know what they are doing with sports, do the same. They include the United Kingdom, Malaysia and South Africa. The idea behind it is: “What gets measured gets done.” So, what the minister s doing requires federations to develop detailed documents to guide implementation of their deliverables up to 2015, and on them there would be six monthly reports to the President and the public as well. Another good point, except that there’s no bill yet to back up essential aspects. And so the sports minister has challenged the lawmakers: “This bill holds the key to the professionalisation of sports management and development in Nigeria. As I speak, more than 90 per cent of the employees in the National Sports Commission are administrative personnel. This is one of the reasons our various sports federations, our grass-roots sports development, and even our elite athletes development departments are so weak. Yet, we cannot bring in competent professionals that abound in our country because our recruitment process is still managed through the normal civil service bureaucracy.”

That says it all. Civil service bureaucracy and professionalism in sports. The two cannot travel together. What the sports minister is doing here needs to be seen for what it is. And the reason is because, it’s a turnaround that’s as serious as the civil service reform that the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo once embarked upon years back. There will be issues to raise, angles to fine- tune, but there’s no beating the point that this is a fantastic opportunity to start afresh. As fantastic as the Super Eagles that many didn’t expect to excel, but began slowly at the Nations’ Cup in South Africa, and eventually emerged as champions. Deep down, the hollowness called sports administration in the country was linked to the low expectation of Nigerians from their national football teams, linked to how football administration had become one day one scandal, as well as how football administrators threatened the Super Eagles’ coach in South Africa until that one, tired of the harassment tendered his resignation. How these football administrators, from civil service structures, emerged is an issue. The structure of ownership of football clubs led to their emergence. It means the sports minister should not just stop at professionalising sport federations, he should ensure that ownership of football clubs, for instance, is taken out of the hands of state governments, and encourage private bodies to own them. Imagine Globacom owning a football club, and being a member of the Nigerian Premier League, along with other private or corporate owners? What should Nigerians expect under that scenario? And now that President Jonathan had had to intervene to persuade coach Keshi to stay on his job, Abdullahi has a good vehicle to ride in and get the administration of the nation’s football, Nigerians’ number one passion, out of the hands of mediocrities, to those who have sweated to make the nation happy in the past, and who know how to continue to make the nation happy.wp_posts

Short URL: https://newnigerianpolitics.com/?p=28822

Posted by admin on Feb 21 2013. Filed under Headlines, Soccer, Sports, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry