Nigeria’s woeful performance at the Paris Olympics proves more than anything else that we need state intervention in our day-to-day operations and relying on private sector investors will not work

Ayo Akinfe

[1] Once again, Nigeria has finished an Olympic Games without a medal. How a nation of 200m people can fail to pick up one gold, silver or bronze medal at an Olympics just beggars belief. That it does not shame us just tells you everything that is wrong with Nigeria

[2] Watching our athletes as they repeatedly failed in Paris, it was clear they had not put the hours of training in. I remember watching the cycling and rowing events and noticing that the Team Nigeria representatives were some two classes behind the rest of the field

[3] Basically, what was clearly lacking was the four years of hard training you need to compete at Olympics. Our Nigerian athletes had not put in the years of training because there was no funding for them to do so

[4] In the West, athletes get either private sponsorship or national lottery money to pay their athletes so they can devote their time to training. Let us be honest with ourselves, Nigeria is simply never going to attract such sponsorship. Likewise, we have more urgent priorities for National Lottery money

[5] In contrast, China with its state-based programme whereby athletes are effectively civil servants, paid to train everyday, topped the medals table in Paris. I can only see that as the way forward for Nigeria

[6] I want to ask all of you how come Africa has a gross domestic product (GDP) of $2.19trn, while China has a GDP of $12.24trn. They both have identical populations of about 1.3bn people. Unfortunately, the United Nations does not see anything immoral about this. The European Union has a GDP of $18.8trn and a population of about 500m people. What kind of macabre inequality is this? Only state intervention can alter this in my opinion. Africa’s economic weakness is reflected in sports. Great Britain has about twice as many medals as the whole of Africa

[7] With sports, Nigeria has 36 states and each of them needs a programme under which they can pay athletes full time to just train. They can augment whatever they are spending with private sector donations and sponsorships

[8] In the 1980s and 1990s, Nigeria dismantled a lot of her state structures under the unfortunate Structural Adjustment Programme. At the time, we were told that private sector finance would replace state funding. Today, we are living with the effects of that lie. The IMF and World Bank knew perfectly well that Nigeria lacked the capacity to attract that kind of foreign direct investment

[9] Historically, Nigerians have always believed in “See wetin your mate dey do.” Can someone please tell me why this does not extend to the Olympics medals table? Essentially, if we want to turn things around, we need to get our 36 states funding sports big time

[10] If you ask me, we are stuck in a quagmire as our states can barely pay civil servants’ salaries, most will struggle to afford the new minimum wage and in many cases, there is hardly any infrastructural development. Our 36 states are too weak economically to sustain the kind of sports structure we need to excel at the Olympics that would enable us to compete with the likes of China, the US, Great Britain, France, Russia, Japan, Australia, Germany, etc

Ayoakinfe@gmail.com