Following Team Nigeria’s poor outing at the recently concluded 2024 Olympic Games in Paris. France, former President of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria, (AFN), Mr. Dan Ngerem urged the Federal Government to overhaul sports administration and called for a sound management of athletes.
Adding voice to Mr. Ngerem’s lamentation on the decline in Nigeria’s sports is Dr. Daniel Igali, current President of the country’s Wrestling Federation and an Olympic gold medallist.
Speaking on Team Nigeria’s outing at the Paris Games in a no-holds-barred interview with a Lagos-based radio stations. Dr. Igali declared that Nigeria “is not ready to succeed in sports, we are just talking”.
Excerpts:
“I expected we would be probably able to get a podium performance but it wasn’t to be. As the President of the wrestling federation, I also want to tender my apology to the Nigerian nation, because the expectations were high, not because we had that much investment in wrestling but because we had programmed our athletes for about 10 years and expected one or two of them to get a medal.
He said that the federation presidents, secretaries and technical directors had a meeting with the Sports Minister and the Permanent Secretary some months before the Olympics about their preparations which dove-tailed into projections for medals.
“A lot of the Presidents made promises of winning one or two medals, the projections were about five or six medals from Team Nigeria at that meeting.
However, when I spoke, I was quite factual with the Minister, I made him understand that projections are done scientifically, based on your past two World Championships, because the World Championship is the closest thing to the Olympics. So if you have three world champions, you can say well, give or take, you expect two of them to come back as gold medallists. Or you may have silver medallists and you expect them to upgrade to gold. So I asked them, how many gold medallists did we have in all the sports. We had only one bronze in wrestling from Odunayo Adekuroye and that was what we were going into the Olympics with. So when I heard people (the Sports Minister, Senator John Enoh) say we were going to do better than Atlanta 1996, I asked from where?
Igali stressed that “I understand that we are a country that wants to win badly, we are optimists but let the optimism be based on reality”.
Asked what he thinks is the way forward, the Bayelsa State Sports Commissioner said, “I just hope the President (Bola Tinubu) will now look deep into sports, offer even 50per cent of the funds required for sports, because right now, the funding from government is about 5per cent of what sports require. Maybe President Tinubu should do convene a National Conference on sports development where we will all sit down and thinker with what we think we can do to get sports back on the right path towards the 2028 Olympics but really for 2032”.
Asked on the way forward out of the gloom, the Bayelsa-born sports administrator said that government is not funding sports development but competitions.
“What has been happening is that government doesn’t fund activities of the federations. There is no way you can make commensurate success or progression in sports if you don’t fund federations. I have been a Federation President for about 12 years now and I have not received 10 kobo for the internal programmes of the wrestling federation. Programmes for U-13, U-15, U-17, U-20 and the senior teams which are most times A and B. And we don’t have any. What Nigeria does now is to fund Games like the African Games, Commonwealth Games and the Olympic Games. Everybody wants to be at the Games because there is a lot of estacodes to earn”.
He stressed that what athletes and the federations need are other competitions like the Grand Prix in places like Egypt and Paris where athletes can actually be developed.
“There is no way you can go to the Olympics with your top who competes once a year and expect the athlete to defeat his counterparts from other countries who may have had 30 matches in one year.
When I was in the national team of Nigeria before I went to Canada, the total number of matches I had from 1990 to 1994 was 27 matches as a national athlete.
I went to Canada and in 1995, alone, I had 47 matches, in 1996, I had 52 matches and in 1997, I had 73 matches. In 1998, I was now in the national team and I came back to 54 matches. Then in 1999, I was now a world champion, so I didn’t have to go above 50 matches.
As a college(university) student, I was competing in about 15 tournaments, I was competing almost every weekend. That is where you begin to hone your skills and when you get to the mat, you are not scared of who is there. That is what our athletes need and it is expensive. If we really want to do sports, it is very expensive.
Still, on funding, Igali said he is disappointed with the private sector in Nigeria because of their lack of support for sports and athletes.
“One of our biggest problems in Nigeria is the private sector. They just don’t give a hoot about sports. Blessing Oborududu won the first Olympic silver medal in the history of wrestling and the highest medal in the Tokyo Olympics, do you know how much she got from the private sector? Zero Naira. Not one penny was given to her. It was only the Bayelsa State government that gave her N4million.
This was the same athlete who went back again to Paris with a fracture on her femur to compete. And we are talking about our athletes doing well at a major Games.
Igali disclosed that as a national champion in Canada, he got thousands of dollars from different private companies and sponsors from 1998 till 2000 when he won the Olympic gold.
“And we want to succeed in sports? We are not ready to succeed, we are just talking. I tell you this. after two weeks, this talk about our poor outing in Paris will die down and it’s going to be business as usual. We will go back to funding the African Games, Commonwealth Games and Olympic Games and get ready two weeks to each.
If we really want to fund sports, let us get ready and fund sports. We promised gold medallists in the Paris Olympics $5,000, meanwhile, Morocco promised $346,000 for the same gold and Ecuador had $150,000. We are not a serious country.
He also talked about the release of the paltry funds the government gives to sports which he said though he appreciates but regrets it comes very late almost always.
“Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom, serious countries as I am talking now, have already approved and released hundreds of millions of dollars for 2025 and 2026. If we are going to be serious with sports, we cannot look at it as the normal budgetary cycle, it must be multi-year cycle. What was due for this Olympics (2024) should have been released last year or a year before.
On the duty of the federations and the presidents, he said it is not their responsibility to look for funding for their activities, stressing that the large chunk of funding is the responsibility of the government.
“The truth of the matter is that it is Nigeria that is going to the Olympics and the government should do a chunk of the funding, even support can come from other sectors, the real responsibility is for the government.
The duty of the federations presidents is to get the right people to man the different areas that will provide support to your athletes, coaches and the right education for their administrators.
Talking about wrestling, we ought to have nine national teams, because at the cadet level, we have Greco-Roman, freestyle and female teams. You have the same for the junior and senior teams. So we should have at least nine national coaches, and nine national assistant coaches.
And we should have programmes for each of the cadres of national teams. The coaches should visit schools and recruit the right athletes. This is what is happening in other serious countries like Iran. Russia and the US. That is why sports is very expensive. The US budget for wrestling this year alone (2024) is $60m. What is the budget for Nigeria’s wrestling?
I want our athletes to win because I know we’ve done the barest minimum. Because of the resilience of our athletes, we have gotten to the point where there was an opportunity for us to clinch one or two medals.
So I’m disappointed and we have had that conversation among ourselves. Some of the athletes said they were expecting to do more and have apologised that they were not able to do that.
And I pity the Sports Minister. Some people are even calling for his head. A man that came a few months ago for an Olympics? And how much was released to him and when?
In conclusion, Igali lambasted the government for treating football above other sports and wondered which serious sporting country does that.
“We have turned Nigeria into two classes of athletes – footballers are the number one athletes and everybody else is second class. Football goes to AFCON, it comes back with a silver medal. What do we do for them, they shake the President’s hand, give them plots of land, give them houses, give them national honours.
A month after, our athletes go for the African Games (an equivalent of the AFCON), many of them, over 40 win gold medals, did they have any handshake? Were they promised National Honours? Did they get any plot of land in Abuja? Did they get any houses? What kind of a country are we?
Interview monitored from Port Harcourt.