Ngerem slams Nku

Dan Ngerem and the Sports Minister should stop dwelling in the past. Mercy Nku has publicly apologised hence must be allowed to compete for Nigeria. Who among us is a saint - the Sports Minister or our smooth-talking AFN President? Let Mercy be!

Slamming or no slamming, Nku will always be

.....
SPORTS

an excerpt highlighting mr Ngerem's ineptitude?...
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


Athens Olympics and Nigeria's debt to Mobil


By Dele Sobowale
Tuesday, July 20, 2004


MR Patrick Ekeji, the Director of Sports Development in the Federal Ministry of Sports, not too long ago was reported to have boasted that Nigeria would return with ten, that’s right ten, gold medals from the Athens Olympics. What Mr. Ekeji did not take into account is that Nigeria might not even have up to ten athletes to send to the Athens Olympics and, at the rate the country is going about the development of athletics, there might be nobody to send to future Olympics.

The reasons for this state of affairs were well captured by Mr Dan Ngerem in the letter he was reported to have written to the Presidency.

Apart from poor preparation of the athletes, is growing indiscipline and the pervasive influence of drugs and sex. The other causes would include poor management of the AFN itself. But that is only part of the reason for this year’s poor showing and the calamity that could follow if care is not taken.
Dan Ngerem himself and his writings represent one of the reasons why Nigerian athletics is in deep trouble today.


Sports, as everybody knows, is big business, even though the officials of the AFN would want to continue to deceive themselves that it is amateur. To be sure, athletes start as amateurs performing in inter-house tournaments in primary, then secondary schools; and if lucky, they proceed to polytechnics and universities where they would have matured a bit. Another route to stardom has been through representing their states in national athletics competitions or some clubs.


Even at these stages, financing the development of athletes becomes a problem. It is not a mere coincidence that the states that have allocated more funds to sports almost always end up winning the largest number of gold medals. Invariably, those who emerge to represent their country require more funds for training, for better nutrition and healthcare. And that means finding and encouraging sponsors and keeping them.
In those countries where sports had been well developed, private organizations provide the bulk of the funds, followed by philanthropists; governments come last; except in third world countries.

The private organizations sponsoring sports, it must be understood, are under no obligation to do so; sponsorship is voluntary unlike taxes which are mandatory.

In addition, the organization is faced with a wide range of choices from health, to music, to education and of course, sports and even within sports the selection is uncountable. So in selecting to sponsor the development of any sport, the sponsor is actually doing those in the sport a favour. That explains why the sponsor(s) must be cultivated and relationships with them must be as cordial as possible.

I can say this because as Marketing Manager for North Brewery, in Kano, I was the originator of what later became Dala Hard Court in Lawn Tennis in 1983. Actually, it started as POWER STOUT HARD COURT aimed at promoting our brand of stout.

This was to be held jointly with the Kano Club and Kano State Sports Council. Opposition to the alcoholic beverage sponsoring the event, which I was still pushing by virtue of my interest in tennis at the time, resulted in the compromise; Dala is a range of hills in Kano State; so that was how the tournament got its name. North Brewery immediately made it clear that it would sponsor the tournament only in the first two years; thereafter, the situation will be reviewed. In fact, the brewery never returned to the sponsorship of Dala.

Why have I related the Kano experience? To make three points. First, private sponsorship is never totally altruistic; two, somebody must champion the cause on the inside and three, the sponsor must at all times be satisfied that the social returns of sponsoring the particular programme outweigh any others that t