President-elect urged to focus on other sports

Nigeria’s President-elect, General Muhammadu Buhari (retd.), who won the election of March 28, has been charged to name a sport minister who will not be football biased.

Over the years, followers of sports, especially in the last 16 years of democracy, have been complaining about the way ministers of sport get carried away with the popularity of football.

This happen at the expense of other sports that are also in need of attention in various ways. A member of the media committee of the Confederation of Africa Football, Paul Bassey, should ordinarily be drumming up more support for football.

Bassey however noted that the best thing the President– elect can do for millions of sports followers in Nigeria was to ensure that other sports were not neglected as witnessed over the years. He said: “We need a minister who will understand sport the way it is all over the world and not a minister that will come and learn on the job.

“More importantly, the President-elect should be able to ensure that the minister picked for sport will be able to develop the entire sector instead of over-concentrating on football. “Football can fend for itself if we work hard towards it. Volleyball, handball, squash, basketball and lots more need attention but this has not been the case. “Another big issue is the inability of the sports ministry to develop athletes in various disciplines from the grass roots.

This is necessary to catch some budding athletes young” Another sport analyst, Godwin Dudu-Orumen, stressed that it was crucial for General Buhari to name a minister of sports that has vision for the sector. Dudu-Orumen said; “So many things that are wrong in sports are unattended to because the sports ministers always concentrate on football. No one cares what happens to other sports but football is being over-pampered. “We also expect that facilities should be privatised for effective maintenance but this is not the case.

It is important for the president-elect to give a direction in this regard this time for sport to move on better. “At the Olympics games, football can win only one gold medal and there will be about 40 players and officials involved in achieving that but with less than 10 athletes and officials, other sports like boxing, wrestling, swimming, gymnastics and others can record multiple medals.”