During the tenure of Barrister Solomon Dalung as the Minister of Youth and Sports, he had every cause to bewail the scrapping of sports and physical education in the nation’s school curriculum.
At one forum in Abuja, Dalung noted that institutional sports which included school sports were the foundation of the glorious years in Nigeria, wondering how the country got to a point that physical education was eliminated in our schools.
He had said: “There ought to be a synergy between the Ministry of Youth and Sports and the Ministry of Education for compulsory introduction of school sports and physical education because that is the foundation of sports development and we cannot do without it.”
Encouraging as the minister’s assurances were at the time, no one was enthusiastic about any renewed zeal to bring back sports to our schools across the country. We have heard about such collaboration between the Ministry of Youth and Sports and its Education counterpart in the past. Where it is encouraged, the organisers do so perfunctorily.
Prior to the creation of the sports ministry, the ministries of education at the regional level were saddled with the responsibility of running sports both in the primary and secondary schools. The colonial masters bequeathed to us schools that were complete with sports facilities and no such institutions were complete without physical and health education teachers who served as games masters. Inter-house and inter-school competitions featured regularly. Inter-regional competitions were also organised. Popular among them were the Hussey Shield and Manuwa Cup competed for among post-primary institutions in the 60s. There was also the Academicals Soccer Championships that produced great players for the old Green Eagles.
The Gowon administration took the vision to the next level when it introduced the National Sports Festival (NSF) in 1973 that featured three categories of athletes –Under-13, the intermediate and senior – drawn from all the 12 states that made up the country. However, dishonesty sounded the death knell of the critical component of the festival –the U-13 category. For, after the maiden festival, the vision to catch them young was killed because overage athletes were packaged for that category.
Interestingly, virtually all the major sporting events were captured at the festival. Before the national fiesta, competitions were held at the local government level aimed at selecting grassroots athletes for the state sports festivals, after which contingents were picked to participate at the national level.
The NSF also served as a platform to unearth raw talents. Successive state governments kept faith with the philosophy of the founders by ensuring that the jamboree was staged as at when due. The beauty of the festival was that most of the athletes were drawn from primary and secondary schools across the country.
At a point in recent years, the fiesta went into limbo for a long period of time, especially between 2012 when Lagos state hosted the jamboree. Akwa Ibom state which bid to host the 2014 edition showed serious commitment. Another festival ought to have taken place in 2016. However, the federal government took the bull by the horns and breathed new life into the jamboree and staged one in Abuja in 2018 since no states were forthcoming.
The dormancy of the festival between 2012 and 2018 also spoke volumes about the lack of commitment to sports by government at all levels. Many state governments have not come to terms with the fact that sports are now big business across the globe. For a nation like Nigeria which is endowed with a very young and active population, government’s relegation of sports to the background could be a perilous pastime.
Most Nigerian youths now see sports as a route to escape poverty and hardships. It is public knowledge that several Nigerian migrants in pursuit of better life in Europe either perish in the Mediterranean Sea or end up as slaves. Such energy and desperation could be channeled into sports through which they could achieve their ambitions.
Blueprint is of the strong view that reintroducing sports and physical education in the school curriculum is the right direction to go, the Ministry of Education in alliance with the Ministry of Sports should come up with a policy that will henceforth make provision of playing ground and sports facilities a prerequisite for the establishment of primary and secondary schools especially by private owners, without which no approval should be given. A situation where schools are set up in residential buildings, garages or makeshift structures should no longer be condoned.
