ECOWAS Crisis – Sports to the rescue

Letter To Mr. President

Your Excellency,

On behalf of all Nigerians, I salute you, sir.

In the year 2002, I was an emissary of former President Olusegun Obasanjo GCFR. I was head of a delegation that was sent with letters to four Presidents on the West Coast of Africa.

At each of the countries’ capitals my contingent and I were well received and lavishly feted.

When we met with the President of Ghana at the time, John Kofi Agyekum Kufour, his praise for the role and leadership of Nigeria in Africa was inspiring. When Nigeria coughed, he said, the rest of West Africa caught cold. What Nigeria wanted in the sub-region, Nigeria got!

It is common knowledge that Nigeria had fought many wars and spent fortunes to protect and support several African countries, and to keep the fire of unity and collaboration in the continent burning.

For decades, the whole of West Africa looked towards Nigeria’s leadership to develop more rapidly, remove the last vestiges of colonialism and eliminate the political, social and cultural differences between the countries.

President Obasanjo’s letter was to introduce to the four other leaders a global event that would involve and impact the entire region, and indirectly implement the primary goals of ECOWAS – 15 West African countries working as a community without restrictive borders, with a common currency, a common airline, a common visa, a common security apparatus, a common market, a superhighway and a rail system running across the region from Dakar in the West to Calabar in the East, mostly along a wasting coastline, all 3000 miles of it.

It was a great project that would have created eight years of unprecedented collaboration, development and an economic boom driven by soft-power tools – Sport,