The Nigeria Football Federation has been in the news headlines lately. The news has not been good because Nigeria’s national teams, from U17 to the flagship Super Eagles and Super Falcons, have failed to qualify for World Cup outings. For the Super Eagles, it was back-to-back.The news has been compounded by the upcoming elections to the Federation’s Board. Calls for the resignation or outright ouster of its president, Ibrahim Gusau, are viral. It is so outlandish that Super Eagles legend, Segun Odegbami, even called for the postponement of the NFF elections. Tampering with the inner workings of member federations in FIFA is anathema in Zurich, where football’s world governing body is located. The emotions are definitely in overdrive.If only it were the emotions, we might have been able to live with it. Still, reputable news outlets like Arise News and The Guardian have joined dark-alley websites to promote all manner of fake news, reporting the arrest of NFF board members by the DSS, the resignation of some NFF board members, the dissolution of the NFF board by the federal government, et al.For me, though, the problem is not just with the NFF or Nigerian football alone, but with Nigerian sports and the way we run it. No serious country or, put in another way, any country that wants to win Olympic Games medals, let alone gold, will run sports the way we do in Nigeria.Most sports federations in Nigeria have Boards. Members of the boards are elected. While the electoral processes are home-grown, they often require approval from international governing bodies such as Fédération Internationale de Football Association, World Athletics, FIBA, etc. One common issue with local governing bodies is interference from either the Ministry of Sports or the National Sports Commission, something that is clearly and decisively frowned upon by the world governing bodies. But the Ministry/NSC still does it anyway.One cannot fault this iron-cast decision by sports governing bodies that precludes interference from anyone, including the president of a country. Just imagine what the likes of the immediate past Minister of Sports Development, Sunday Dare, did during his tenure. He caused D’Tigress’s withdrawal from the 2022 world championship in Sydney, Australia. That was not all. Dare started a feud over a $2.76m sponsorship and licensing deal the Athletics Federation of Nigeria had with Puma. And we are talking about a deal that was already in place before he became the Minister of Sports Development.While the kits were in Nigeria, Dare did not allow them to be used, and things became so bad that Nigerian athletes ran into a shortage of kits at the 2022 Olympics because one man had issues with a deal he was not part of.It was clear that Dare was riding roughshod over people and structures elected to boards, to the extent that he dictated the venue of the 2022 World Cup qualifier against Ghana to be Abuja, against the coach’s wishes. In fact, he almost forced himself into training with the national team. Coach Gernot Rohr wasn’t amused.What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State The news has been compounded by the upcoming elections to the Federation’s Board. Calls for the resignation or outright ouster of its president, Ibrahim Gusau, are viral. It is so outlandish that Super Eagles legend, Segun Odegbami, even called for the postponement of the NFF elections. Tampering with the inner workings of member federations in FIFA is anathema in Zurich, where football’s world governing body is located. The emotions are definitely in overdrive.If only it were the emotions, we might have been able to live with it. Still, reputable news outlets like Arise News and The Guardian have joined dark-alley websites to promote all manner of fake news, reporting the arrest of NFF board members by the DSS, the resignation of some NFF board members, the dissolution of the NFF board by the federal government, et al.For me, though, the problem is not just with the NFF or Nigerian football alone, but with Nigerian sports and the way we run it. No serious country or, put in another way, any country that wants to win Olympic Games medals, let alone gold, will run sports the way we do in Nigeria.Most sports federations in Nigeria have Boards. Members of the boards are elected. While the electoral processes are home-grown, they often require approval from international governing bodies such as Fédération Internationale de Football Association, World Athletics, FIBA, etc. One common issue with local governing bodies is interference from either the Ministry of Sports or the National Sports Commission, something that is clearly and decisively frowned upon by the world governing bodies. But the Ministry/NSC still does it anyway.One cannot fault this iron-cast decision by sports governing bodies that precludes interference from anyone, including the president of a country. Just imagine what the likes of the immediate past Minister of Sports Development, Sunday Dare, did during his tenure. He caused D’Tigress’s withdrawal from the 2022 world championship in Sydney, Australia. That was not all. Dare started a feud over a $2.76m sponsorship and licensing deal the Athletics Federation of Nigeria had with Puma. And we are talking about a deal that was already in place before he became the Minister of Sports Development.While the kits were in Nigeria, Dare did not allow them to be used, and things became so bad that Nigerian athletes ran into a shortage of kits at the 2022 Olympics because one man had issues with a deal he was not part of.It was clear that Dare was riding roughshod over people and structures elected to boards, to the extent that he dictated the venue of the 2022 World Cup qualifier against Ghana to be Abuja, against the coach’s wishes. In fact, he almost forced himself into training with the national team. Coach Gernot Rohr wasn’t amused.What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State If only it were the emotions, we might have been able to live with it. Still, reputable news outlets like Arise News and The Guardian have joined dark-alley websites to promote all manner of fake news, reporting the arrest of NFF board members by the DSS, the resignation of some NFF board members, the dissolution of the NFF board by the federal government, et al.For me, though, the problem is not just with the NFF or Nigerian football alone, but with Nigerian sports and the way we run it. No serious country or, put in another way, any country that wants to win Olympic Games medals, let alone gold, will run sports the way we do in Nigeria.Most sports federations in Nigeria have Boards. Members of the boards are elected. While the electoral processes are home-grown, they often require approval from international governing bodies such as Fédération Internationale de Football Association, World Athletics, FIBA, etc. One common issue with local governing bodies is interference from either the Ministry of Sports or the National Sports Commission, something that is clearly and decisively frowned upon by the world governing bodies. But the Ministry/NSC still does it anyway.One cannot fault this iron-cast decision by sports governing bodies that precludes interference from anyone, including the president of a country. Just imagine what the likes of the immediate past Minister of Sports Development, Sunday Dare, did during his tenure. He caused D’Tigress’s withdrawal from the 2022 world championship in Sydney, Australia. That was not all. Dare started a feud over a $2.76m sponsorship and licensing deal the Athletics Federation of Nigeria had with Puma. And we are talking about a deal that was already in place before he became the Minister of Sports Development.While the kits were in Nigeria, Dare did not allow them to be used, and things became so bad that Nigerian athletes ran into a shortage of kits at the 2022 Olympics because one man had issues with a deal he was not part of.It was clear that Dare was riding roughshod over people and structures elected to boards, to the extent that he dictated the venue of the 2022 World Cup qualifier against Ghana to be Abuja, against the coach’s wishes. In fact, he almost forced himself into training with the national team. Coach Gernot Rohr wasn’t amused.What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State For me, though, the problem is not just with the NFF or Nigerian football alone, but with Nigerian sports and the way we run it. No serious country or, put in another way, any country that wants to win Olympic Games medals, let alone gold, will run sports the way we do in Nigeria.Most sports federations in Nigeria have Boards. Members of the boards are elected. While the electoral processes are home-grown, they often require approval from international governing bodies such as Fédération Internationale de Football Association, World Athletics, FIBA, etc. One common issue with local governing bodies is interference from either the Ministry of Sports or the National Sports Commission, something that is clearly and decisively frowned upon by the world governing bodies. But the Ministry/NSC still does it anyway.One cannot fault this iron-cast decision by sports governing bodies that precludes interference from anyone, including the president of a country. Just imagine what the likes of the immediate past Minister of Sports Development, Sunday Dare, did during his tenure. He caused D’Tigress’s withdrawal from the 2022 world championship in Sydney, Australia. That was not all. Dare started a feud over a $2.76m sponsorship and licensing deal the Athletics Federation of Nigeria had with Puma. And we are talking about a deal that was already in place before he became the Minister of Sports Development.While the kits were in Nigeria, Dare did not allow them to be used, and things became so bad that Nigerian athletes ran into a shortage of kits at the 2022 Olympics because one man had issues with a deal he was not part of.It was clear that Dare was riding roughshod over people and structures elected to boards, to the extent that he dictated the venue of the 2022 World Cup qualifier against Ghana to be Abuja, against the coach’s wishes. In fact, he almost forced himself into training with the national team. Coach Gernot Rohr wasn’t amused.What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Most sports federations in Nigeria have Boards. Members of the boards are elected. While the electoral processes are home-grown, they often require approval from international governing bodies such as Fédération Internationale de Football Association, World Athletics, FIBA, etc. One common issue with local governing bodies is interference from either the Ministry of Sports or the National Sports Commission, something that is clearly and decisively frowned upon by the world governing bodies. But the Ministry/NSC still does it anyway.One cannot fault this iron-cast decision by sports governing bodies that precludes interference from anyone, including the president of a country. Just imagine what the likes of the immediate past Minister of Sports Development, Sunday Dare, did during his tenure. He caused D’Tigress’s withdrawal from the 2022 world championship in Sydney, Australia. That was not all. Dare started a feud over a $2.76m sponsorship and licensing deal the Athletics Federation of Nigeria had with Puma. And we are talking about a deal that was already in place before he became the Minister of Sports Development.While the kits were in Nigeria, Dare did not allow them to be used, and things became so bad that Nigerian athletes ran into a shortage of kits at the 2022 Olympics because one man had issues with a deal he was not part of.It was clear that Dare was riding roughshod over people and structures elected to boards, to the extent that he dictated the venue of the 2022 World Cup qualifier against Ghana to be Abuja, against the coach’s wishes. In fact, he almost forced himself into training with the national team. Coach Gernot Rohr wasn’t amused.What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State One cannot fault this iron-cast decision by sports governing bodies that precludes interference from anyone, including the president of a country. Just imagine what the likes of the immediate past Minister of Sports Development, Sunday Dare, did during his tenure. He caused D’Tigress’s withdrawal from the 2022 world championship in Sydney, Australia. That was not all. Dare started a feud over a $2.76m sponsorship and licensing deal the Athletics Federation of Nigeria had with Puma. And we are talking about a deal that was already in place before he became the Minister of Sports Development.While the kits were in Nigeria, Dare did not allow them to be used, and things became so bad that Nigerian athletes ran into a shortage of kits at the 2022 Olympics because one man had issues with a deal he was not part of.It was clear that Dare was riding roughshod over people and structures elected to boards, to the extent that he dictated the venue of the 2022 World Cup qualifier against Ghana to be Abuja, against the coach’s wishes. In fact, he almost forced himself into training with the national team. Coach Gernot Rohr wasn’t amused.What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State While the kits were in Nigeria, Dare did not allow them to be used, and things became so bad that Nigerian athletes ran into a shortage of kits at the 2022 Olympics because one man had issues with a deal he was not part of.It was clear that Dare was riding roughshod over people and structures elected to boards, to the extent that he dictated the venue of the 2022 World Cup qualifier against Ghana to be Abuja, against the coach’s wishes. In fact, he almost forced himself into training with the national team. Coach Gernot Rohr wasn’t amused.What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State It was clear that Dare was riding roughshod over people and structures elected to boards, to the extent that he dictated the venue of the 2022 World Cup qualifier against Ghana to be Abuja, against the coach’s wishes. In fact, he almost forced himself into training with the national team. Coach Gernot Rohr wasn’t amused.What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State What about another former Minister of Sports, Solomon Dalung? Things he would have done had he had unfettered control over the NFF, given the one too many impasses he caused with his preferred candidate and relative, Chris Giwa, after the election of Amaju Pinick as NFF president in 2014, can only be left to imagination. Again, it was intriguing because Dalung came into office over a year after Pinick was elected. Yet, he still used his office to cause lots of altercations over an election that had been held before he came to office.At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State At your advent, President Bola Tinubu, the Ministry of Sports gave way to the NSC, with Shehu Dikko appointed chairman and Bukola Olopade as director-general. By its name, a Commission is supposed to focus on personnel, like the Civil Service Commission or Teaching Service Commission. In addition, a Commission is supposed to have commissioners or a board. Currently, this NSC has gone far beyond personnel issues, and no one else sits at the apex of the commission besides Dikko and Olopade. It leaves a huge gap.Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Let’s assume the enabling legislation allows the NSC to do more than just personnel issues; the NSC’s efforts to stubbornly lord it over federations that have elected boards have become a serious and, at times, annoying concern. It’s not just now. It’s been happening in earlier iterations of the NSC and when we had a Ministry of Sports Development. I believe the NSC’s negative, overarching influence is the bane of Nigerian sports as we speak, and it is time that, as the President of Nigeria, you wield the big stick. For me, you are Nigeria’s most reformist president, meaning you have more than what it takes to come into this matter and change the face of how Nigerian sports work.The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State The Civil Service Commission has never tried to run ministries, departments, and agencies. At the sub-national level, the Teaching Service Commissions don’t run schools. Not even the Ministry of Education micromanages schools at any level. They handle personnel matters, put policies in place, set limits, supervise, and provide oversight. Someone also needs to break this down to the NSC. The more irksome thing is that when federations like NFF fail and, of course, this current NFF did not do well, the blame should go around, not on NFF alone.Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Everybody is blaming the NFF, but what about the NSC? When the Super Eagles tried to qualify for the World Cup through a protest against the Democratic Republic of Congo, we never once saw the NFF President, Ibrahim Gusau, address the public; rather, it was always Shehu Dikko. The NSC was clearly the face of all the nonsensical shenanigans in our football debacle, to the extent that Dikko even misled your good self, Mr President, on the World Cup qualification. Recently, there was an announcement that the prize money for the Nigerian Premier Football League winner is now N2bn, and players’ salaries can no longer be less than N2m per month. Dikko made this announcement, even though the NPFL chairman should ordinarily have made it.Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Whether it is the Ministry of Sports or the NSC, they obviously like to steal the spotlight, but when the dung hits the fan, they disappear and start blaming federations like the NFF. Case in point, Mr President, was when you used your good offices to approve the release of N12bn for the payment of all backlogs of players’ and coaches’ allowances, as reported by major media on January 7, 2024; there was a Ministry of Sports, which did not release the funds. But now, only the NFF is seen as an anathema. It supports the assertion that it is a systemic problem in our sports that can be corrected.My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State My write-up is not to portray the current NFF Board as saints, far from it. In fact, members of the NFF Board are culpable in bringing Nigeria to the dregs. This write-up invites the attention of the Presidency to this moment as an opportunity to undertake wholesale reforms in our sports sector. If we don’t do it now and a new NFF comes into office without curtailing the NSC or strictly instructing the NSC to obey its own laws, we are likely to be back at this juncture in four years. Or it could be another sport entirely facing crisis. Remember, four years ago, Nigeria failed to qualify for the 2022 World Cup, and it didn’t look like there was a way forward for the NFF President then, Pinick, so he didn’t contest the next election, which brought Gusau to office. However, history has repeated itself with another failure at the World Cup qualifying hurdle.By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State By the way, we don’t need to look too far. Our performance at the last Olympics in Paris was a statement. We won no medals. In Tokyo 2020, we won a silver and a bronze. In Rio 2016, our football team won our only medal, a bronze medal. Since then, the U23 team has not qualified for another football event at the Olympics. As the women’s team, Nigeria played women’s football in Paris and lost all three games to Brazil, Spain, and Japan, but that was after a whopping 16-year failure to qualify. Looking further back, in London 2012, we won no medal. In any case, Nigeria last won an Olympic gold medal in 2000. It followed our two-gold performance in Atlanta 1996.The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State The 90s were our golden years in sports, but after 2000, we started to wane. We won the most medals at an Olympic Games in 2008, with three silver and two bronze medals. In essence, the problem is with our sports, not just our football. Yes, there have been situations that bucked the negative trend, like continental victories for the Super Falcons and D’Tigress at WAFCON and AfroBasket, respectively. Even the men’s basketball team, the D’Tigers, won the men’s version of the AfroBasket in 2015. Our last AFCON triumph came in 2013, and we even failed to qualify for two tournaments thereafter, but we have back-to-back silver and bronze in the last two editions. However, we have achieved these victories only with players in the Diaspora.This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State This connotes that there are hardly any sports developmental activities in Nigeria. The stark truth is that Nigeria cannot even win an African title without sportsmen and women born or based abroad, along with foreign coaches. When those foreign coaches come to Nigeria, they soon discover our homegrown athletes are not up to the task, and they start recruiting players of Nigerian descent from the rich NCAA of the United States or clubs scattered all over the world. Thankfully, the NPFL is starting to improve its organization, but let’s be honest. As of the last World Cup qualifiers, no Super Eagles player had ever played in the NPFL at any time except for goalkeeper Stanley Nwabali. All the players were either born abroad or left the country at a very young age. This is also true for other sports.Related News166 players compete at 9th Lagos Int’l Badminton ClassicsLOC unveils official website for Eko 2026To subsidy or not to subsidy?Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Can we do it? Yes, we can! In fact, we have done it before. All our past triumphs started in Nigeria. It’s just that these days, the NSC has lost focus and is more interested in photo-ops and media PR. Recently, Nigeria came back from the Commonwealth Games with 11 gold medals, and the NSC sponsored a media hype, claiming that it was an “outstanding” outing for Nigeria. No, it wasn’t an outstanding Commonwealth Games for Nigeria.We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State We won 12 gold and 35 medals in Birmingham 2022, while in 1994 we won 11 gold and a total of 37 medals, compared to 24 medals in Glasgow. The excuse that 10 sports were cut from the Games is not totally truthful. First, of those 10 sports, Nigeria has consistently won medals only in wrestling at this level. It’s not like we have even participated in rugby, triathlon, diving, beach volleyball, cricket, etc., before, let alone won any medals there. Second, the 10 games absent from the Commonwealth Games did not affect only Nigeria but all countries!In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State In recent times, South Africa and Botswana have taken over from Nigeria in dominating African tracks with home-grown athletes, while Kenya and Ethiopia continue to lead in distance running. In fact, Kenya, Botswana and South Africa have hosted the World Athletics Continental Tours this year. What has Nigeria hosted? Zilch! And then some people chose to mislead Mr President into thinking that we can host the Commonwealth Games in 2032. What a waste of time and resources. The truth is, we would have embarrassed ourselves because we don’t have the facilities to host the Commonwealth Games. Does Abuja even have an Olympic-size swimming pool? The funding required to build the needed facilities would have been too much for our recovering economy. In fact, talk or embarrassment: we embarrassed ourselves with another bid to host the All-Africa Games by submitting the Commonwealth Games bid for the All-Africa Games bid, meaning terms related to the Commonwealth Games were not edited out of the bid!Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Why not seek to host WAC Tours as some of our African countries did? Why not plan for tournaments like AFCON, WAFCON, AfroBasket, or other African championships, etc build on that before attempting to host the Commonwealth Games? This also means the country must address the dearth of standard facilities. Currently, Nigeria has only two approved stadiums for continental football in Uyo and Abeokuta. By the way, Abeokuta cannot actually host Grade A international matches. This is a far cry from Morocco, which boasts 16, while South Africa and Egypt have 13 and eight, respectively. Shouldn’t Nigeria be on the list of top African nations with quality stadiums? The same Nigeria that hosted the 1999 World Youth Championship and followed it up with co-hosting AFCON in 2000. In fact, we hosted the bulk of the matches of that AFCON. We also hosted the All-Africa Games in 2003 and the U17 World Cup in 2009. Now, we cannot boast of more than two standard stadiums. This is just infra diginitatem.But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State But here we are in 2026, only two stadia – Uyo and Abeokuta – are fit at the moment to host continental and/or international games. I read recently that Rangers, all the way from Enugu, will play their continental home games in Abeokuta. This is certainly abysmal, but the NSC is busy beefing the NFF. What irks me most is that we think the NFF is at fault for all our avoidable troubles and has become the current punching bag everyone should tip on. As I have said, the NFF cannot be lawless and the NSC flawless.Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Except we want to deceive ourselves, sir, the NSC, or Ministry of Sports Development, has lost its way, and that is where we must start. The statute establishing the National Sports Commission Act was first promulgated as a Decree in 1971, and based on articles written by veteran sports journalist Ikeddy Isiguzo in November 2024 in BusinessDay, late President Muhammadu Buhari assented to the National Sports Commission Bill in his last days in office. The articles alleged that the NSC is, however, still unlawful because a two-person Board of Shehu Dikko and Bukola Olopade cannot represent the 17-man Commission prescribed by the Act. I once challenged the DG of the NSC to make the Act public on a WhatsApp forum after he claimed that the law permits the NSC to micromanage the federations, such as taking it upon itself to pay players’ allowances directly. He did not oblige.Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Whichever way we slice and dice it, the NSC is wrongly focused. NSC cannot try to run federations while sports development suffers. NSC cannot undertake direct payment of allowances to athletes while we lack sports facilities. Availability of top-notch facilities should be a major focus of NSC, but ferrying supporters to away matches and direct payment of dollars to Super Eagles players have appeared to be more important to NSC. Who knows, if we had a good facility in Lagos, the Benin Republic might have played its 2026 WCQs in Lagos rather than CIV, which is farther, and the benefit would have been ours.Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Of course, NFF is at its nadir as we speak, but let NSC get its act right, and NFF will also reset. If NSC hadn’t been too deep into NFF’s affairs, NSC would have sorted out the issue of the cultic NFF elections long ago. It’s a function of the system in place, and it’s not today.No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State No governing body of sports outside Nigeria even recognizes NSC or the Ministry of Sports Development. The International Olympic Committee can only relate to our National Olympic Committee, and FIFA knows only the NFF, and World Athletics speaks to the Athletics Federation of Nigeria. So, it’s often a big wonder seeing the NSC hopping on flights to every competition, even friendly matches like the Unity Cup in London in May/June, where it is not invited or relevant. Sports federations should run professional sports. Simple. They have Boards, but the NSC isn’t even allowing them to work. It would be interesting to know the exact amount of money that the NSC has transferred to, for instance, the NFF, since the current NSC administration came into office before we start blaming the NFF for its failure.Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Please, sir, let the job of the NSC be well-defined and clearly restricted to:Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Churning out and refining sports policies – for example, the NSC should address the obnoxious electoral process of the NFF.Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Overseeing (not micromanaging) sports as a regulatory body. The NSC cannot be a regulatory body for federations; that would be micromanaging.Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Auditing how funds are spent rather than being the ones to spend the fundsReceiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Receiving periodic reports and doing background checks on the reportsDevelopmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Developmental activities such as scouting and nurturing athletes to stardom, including building capacities in coaches and physical education teachersFurthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Furthermore, NSC should revive and concentrate on areas like YSFON, school sports, academicals, NUGA, NIPOGA, NACTEGA, sports scholarships, etc.What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State What serious countries actually do is use SMART documents to envision what they want and where they want to be. This means laws and their incumbent activities that forestall growth and also lead to repeated failures must be retired, and new foundations laid. If we continue to operate within the ambit of a faulty statute or program and its attendant implementation, then we are wrong. That’s the point.Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State Bunmi Akinsemola, a sports enthusiast and public affairs analyst, writes from Akure, Ondo State