Sunday Dare Reversed Reforms I Made In Sports Federations Solomon Dalung, former Minister of Sports, in this interview with CHIBUIKE CHUKWU, took a look at Nigeria’s performance at the just ended 2024 Olympic Games in Paris, France, proffering solutions while blaming the current rot in the nation’s sports sector on the sports federations, as well as the minister whom he said is a misfit for the position. Dalung also said former sports minister, Sunday Dare, reversed all the reforms he carried out in the sector. As the former Minister of Sports, what is your assessment of Team Nigeria’s performance at the recently ended Olympic Games in Paris? Our performance in the last Olympics was indeed abysmal and shameful to say the least. But then when you have this kind of problem, you need to interrogate some issues. First the minister, through actions, admitted that he had little knowledge about the ministry assigned to him. But that should not have been the reason for such poor performance from Team Nigeria; all he needed to provide was leadership to the technocrats and the technical components on the ground in the ministry in order to produce the result. But the minister didn’t do that and he also didn’t extend hands of friendship; worse of it is that he is not even a team player and because he is not a team player, he has violated the fundamental rule of sports itself; sports is a team work, so. If he is a sports administrator, he couldn’t have wanted to succeed alone. As someone who was there before, did you make any effort to react out to him, especially as Nigeria was preparing for the Olympic Games? I tried to reach out to him to congratulate him when he was appointed and also to give him some advice and encourage him as to how to deal with issues at hand which is the preparation for the Olympics because it was obvious that he knew next to nothing about sports but he turned down my request and perhaps so many other requests like that. We met at one sports event and I can tell you that his statement embarrassed me as a former minister. It was at a monthly walkout of the Civil Service Games. He was invited and he came late. When he came, his statement was quite embarrassing to us; he was saying things as if that Games never existed before. Civil Service Games is one of those components of sports in Nigeria; he said when they will have their annual Games, they will realise that the entire office will be depopulated. And I asked whether he wasn’t briefed before even coming to the event; and I asked that he should start with briefings from the various departments in the ministry so that he can be informed about what is required of him. I also said I will request to see him; he said ok he was going to make out time to ensure we meet. Till today, he hasn’t done that. Back to the 2024 Olympic Games; what do you think went wrong? If we are going to ask ourselves what happened at the Olympics, we should be ready to also ask ourselves what were the problems that led to that. And when you look at it, the minister is not only a stranger to sports, he is also not a team player and he is a complete misfit to that office he occupies. Managing him like that is going to be very difficult because he doesn’t consult and at his level, he is not likely going to change. The best the president can do right now is to reassign him to another ministry because we are even going to have worse performance if he remains as the minister, that is number one; number two, we need to probe the huge amount of money invested in the 2024 Olympics. Nigerians admitted that funds weren’t the problem in the Olympics but for me, funds were the problem. How was funding the problem and can you relate it to the Rio Olympic Games which you superintended as the Minister of Sports? When I came in as the minister, there was no money. I had to borrow N50 million from a friend, late Senator Ifeanyi Ubah, to camp and train Team Nigeria. We went to Rio De Janeiro four days into the Olympics. That was when we had the first tranche of money from the Federal Government which was meant to prepare and camp the team. It was already four days into the Olympics before the first payment came. I traveled to Rio with my ticket; I mean I bought my ticket to Rio before government refunded the money to me. Even at that, we could have done better than we did in Rio if domestic politics didn’t affect athletes because Blessing could have given us a gold in Rio but because of the heat generated by the Nigerian public and the press about the team, about the preparation which of course many people didn’t know what happened, I had to take the blame as a leader so that I can absolve the government. I took the sacrifice in order to absolve the government. Some of the things that happened were quite awful but of course since I had accepted the job, I had to take responsibility. Despite that, we still came back fine. This is why I say for this last Olympics, I want the government to investigate how N12 billion went down the drain. During my time, we went to the Olympics with N1.8 billion. The initial appropriation by the National Assembly was N400 million; so I had to go for special intervention from the president who had to further approved N1.4 billion. We went with close to 80 athletes and a number of officials as well. In fact we went with one of the modest teams. One of the reasons we didn’t go with many people was because of the funding issue. Apart from probing how the huge amount spent on prosecuting the last Olympic Games was spent, what do you think should be done to reposition sports in Nigeria? I think apart from investigation into how the money was spent in the last Olympics, another issue is that whoever that should be the sports minister should the president heed the call to redeploy the current one should go back to the policy of democratisation of the sports federations which I started in 2016. The democratisation of the sports federations which many have not given attention towards and which is what was responsible for the huge success we recorded is what does and the advantages; democratising the sports federations removes the bureaucrats of the ministry from unnecessary influence on sports administration and place them to concentrate on sports policy; that is monitoring and implementation of sports policies. They monitor and supervise while the sports federations implement these policies. So it would yield great dividends because the best would be brought in to represent the country at events. You have harped on the sports minister as being a misfit for the job; are you going to exonerate the sports federations from the failures of the last Olympic Games? Before you even blame the national sports federations, you have to ask the question; how were the boards appointed. You see, the former sports minister, Sunday Dare, returned sports administration to what I met on ground which I know was the major reason for non-performance in the sector. That bad system I changed was non-inclusive; it was unaccountable and it was encouraging mediocrity where incompetent persons were appointed presidents of sports federations through political appointment. Under that old order which I sacrificed to change, the minister brings in friends, family members and associates as political compensation into boards of sports federations. Consequently, anyone who is in the sports federations sees himself as a political appointee and may not know anything about the federation or what to do to move it forward. When I was in office, the present president of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria contested to be the president of Weightlifting Federation of Nigeria and lost, meaning his parent federation is weightlifting and not athletics. That is what I knew. So how did he now become the president of athletics federation? You can see the problem; so you can see how someone who was a member of one federation, just by reversing a policy, become the president of a federation where he is a total stranger. In this situation, are you saying the congress of Athletics federation will corporate with him? Truth is that the congress knows their members and they know who and who has been in that federation for many years. So when you now use the power of your office as a minister and superimpose somebody from a different federation as the president of another federation, do you expect results afterwards? Obviously you are creating a crisis because the entire members of the federation will be against you. What Other measures did you take to ensure Nigeria performs better during your tenure? After the Rio Olympics, I reviewed the performance of some of the athletes and we had far-reaching measured to ensure Team Nigeria performed better in the next Games but unfortunately everything was politicized. I recall that some of our athletes at the Tokyo Games in 2020 like Brume and others would have given us medals and I was sure Oborududu would have give us gold but there was a lot of crisis and distractions in their camp then. The issue of jersey in which the minster (Dare) rejected a contract which was signed when he was not in office, was a sore point. Truth is that we must go back to the democratisation of sports federations; that is the only way forward else in our next outing, we will not only be coming back empty handed but it would be more embarrassing. What will be your advice to the Federal Government on the urgent step to be taking now in the face of the poor outing in Paris? Do you think FG should ensure sports federations heads are shoved aside? The entire national sports federations should go; during my time as sports minister, we did that through democratisation process and removed most of them who had spent 20, 30 years on the board. Unfortunately when Sunday Dare was made the minister, he brought all of them back and handed over the national federations back to them. He brought back the same people. There must be total overhaul of the national federations and nobody should hold any position in any of the federations unless such person is elected by the congress. This is because once such person is elected by the congress, he would be held accountable. Democratisation means that the board of the national federations must be inclusive. It means the media must have a member in the board, investors must have a member and all concerned stakeholders must have board members and then you elect a president. The private sector will elect their own member of the board and all that. But as it is now, the boards of sports federations are committee of friends of either the minister or some of the directors chosen to safeguard money sent into that federation for their own interest. If the 2024 Olympic money is not investigated, Nigeria will be like a woman who spent so much money to plait her lice-infested hair only to turn and scratch it so much that she loose the hair. This rot in sports federations is what has given reasons for the exclusion of athletes over flimsy excuses like what happened to Ofili Favour. That reminds me of when the captain of the Super Eagles was excluded from a World Cup qualifier in Côte d’Ivoire but it was later turned out that he complained over the poor welfare of himself and his colleagues. Are you telling me that athletes do not have the rights to complain about their own welfare? I don’t know but from antecedents, if you investigate, you will discover that the athlete omitted from her race in Paris might have complained of something unpleasant bothering on welfare and training. By participating in that race, who knows, the last Olympics may be her last opportunity to run the race and if it happens that way, that means they denied her what should be a milestone in her career.