Garden City Games 2011, The Best Ever –Moc

Secretary of the Main Organising Committee (MOC) of the National Sports Festival (Garden City Games 2011), Abba Abdulahi Yola, in this interview with BOLAJI OGUNDELE ranks the Garden  City Games, the best ever, explaining how his committee has been able to plug holes and rise up to challenges. Excerpts:

What is your perception of the games so far?

So far, so good. We started on Monday, which is in line with best practices because there are some sports that need more time to finish, there are events we decided to start two days before the opening ceremony of the festival and so far, the events have been quite good, anywhere we went, we saw athletes in action. We are really on and it has been a very good start.

There have been hitches and hiccups all along, how is the MOC managing the situation?

Of course, I have accepted that fact. Games of this nature, even if it is the Olympics, the first two, three days have to go through this. It is like the aeroplane, once it takes off, there will be some gallops here and there before it stabilises and once it’s airborne and reaches that maximum height, you will then close your eyes and go to sleep. By now, we have started sleeping with our two eyes closed because there are no more challenges now and the games have progressed, but it is normal with this type of event, we are used to it, the challenges must be there but we have been able to overcome them. God willing, there won’t be any further challenges again.

The opening ceremony is today, between today and the closure of the games, what should Nigerians look forward to?

By the time of the opening ceremony, I am sure almost half of the games would have been concluded, medals must have been won and states’ placements would have come out in a better picture, just like today we have the rankings; we have those who have won medals and those who have not won. As for the opening ceremony, the state government has promised us a spectacular opening ceremony which they said no one has ever seen, it is something compared to what we saw in Beijing, China’s opening ceremony. They said that is their surprise to Nigeria. We are waiting to see this.

Comparing this sports festival with the ones you have seen before, how will you rank this one?

Really, this is the best ever. In terms of organisation, in terms of facility, in terms of welfare, this is the best. We set a standard, we said we must change things. These changes are expected to come gradually, but luckily for us at the MOC level, the states’ sports directors queued in with us in the new innovations we brought and we never expected that we could attain 99% success in the new things we introduced, but believe me, we have achieved 100% success in all the new innovations we brought into the National Sports Festival. We followed our time line and it was like clip, clip all the innovations, one after the other, up to this day, which is the opening ceremony.

I think we have really been able to make the necessary changes we want to make in line with best practices. When we will be talking about the next sports festival in Lagos, it is just going to be like ‘come and take’ because all these challenges won’t even be there by the time we get to Lagos. By then, people will know that they must go the way we want them to go if we want to have a good festival like in the Olympics and the Commonwealth Games. That is what we really wanted and we have gotten it. We have worked so hard to get there and God in His own wisdom has brought us to this level. We are really grateful to the state for believing in us and we are now delivering a very successful sports festival.