Ernest Okonkwo and revival of sports commentating

My name is Segun Odegbami. It is a popular name alright in Nigeria, but more people across the African continent know me as ‘Mathematical,’ a nickname coined and gifted to me by a famous sports commentator, late Ernest Okonkwo, during broadcast of football matches on Radio Nigeria in those days.

He was one of a pool of sports commentators at a time in Nigerian football that took the game to the greatest heights through their beautiful, gripping and entertaining commentaries at a time when radio was a bigger and more effective medium than television.

Before Ernest Okonkwo was Ishola Folorunsho. Along with Ernest was a generation of other gifted sportscasters – Sebastine Ofurum, Tolu Fatoyinbo, Kevin Ejiofor, Dele Adetiba, Yinka Craig, Edem Duke and a few others. Their generation, with the sheer power of their commentaries on radio, drove the followership of football in Nigeria to stratospheric levels. They filled the stadia. They sold the newspapers. They turned good players to greats, and immortalised the best of them with nicknames.

By the turn of the last Century, the last of the great football commentators, Emeka Odikpo, Shina Abimbola, and a few others started to make their exit. The tribe ‘vaporised’ in the plume of proliferation of new FM radio stations that took over the space once dominated and monopolised by Radio Nigeria.

The power of conventional radio as a major influence in Nigerian sports diminished in the new world of the Internet of things.

Today, conventional live sports commentating on radio hardly exists in the Nigerian football industry. Few stations have the finances to invest on their own in the coverage of events without major sponsors that view the reach of FM radio stations with apprehension. It is