Celebrating an exiting Minister of Sports

Segun Odegbami

As far as I can recall, it has never happened quite like this in Nigeria’s sports history. I mean, for stakeholders (not all of them though, admittedly) to come together at the end of the tenure of a Sports minister and fete him for doing well. I should know, having been in the corridors of Nigerian sports as an athlete, an administrator, and as a major stakeholder in various aspects since the early 1970s to date. Man don tay for dis game o.

I have had interactions with every Sports Minister since Paulinus Amadike in 1980. He personally handed over the keys of 22 flats that were gifted the members of the 1980 African Cup of Nations winning national football team to the footballers. I was one of them.

Through the decades since then, my line of work and assignments have never strayed away from hard-core sports, providing the opportunity of seeing, from close quarters, the going and coming of ministers in a flurry. I have become an unofficial authority, the ‘Northern Star’ in the constellation, on the subject of Sports Ministers.

I can testify that It is Chief Sunday Dare that finally came, and in three ‘long’ years and a half, shattered the record in longevity and established what some stakeholders believe warrants a befitting exit from sports.

That’s probably why I was invited to be a part of the celebration and to deliver an impartial forensic scorecard.

As an athlete, a football club manager and owner, an athletes’ representative and manager, team manager of the national football team, a sports entrepreneur, a sports educationist, sports media practitioner, sports consultant, and sports ambassador, I can testify that at no time during this period of my sojourn in the ‘planet’ of sports, has it happened that a