Edo State Governor, Godwin Obaseki has disclosed that the state has the facilities to host the 20th edition of the National Sports Festival next year.
The governor who disclosed this while briefing sports247.ng on the preparedness of the state to host the festival, said that there are facilities across the state that will put the state in good stead to set a standard for the festival going forward.
The governor who said that the festival was initiated after the civil war to foster peace and unity in the country added that even though the major challenge the state is facing is finance, said the festival will be private-driven.
“Edo has always been ready for evets especially sports. One fact remains that we have facilities across the entire state to host the festival. Don’t forget that we have major facilities in Afuzie which is a training facility that was built about 40 years ago. The facilities have been revamped and they will be put to use during the festival.
“We are looking at sports as a business, to try and get a lot more private investors to participate in sports in Nigeria. I came from the private sector and we have our plans and as the plans are unveiled, you will see that the key differentiating factor between the Edo 2020 and past hosts is that a lot of private sector entities will come in. By so doing we will remove the burden of running sports from the government wholly.
“It is part of the whole renewal of Nigeria. Don’t forget that it was after the civil war that our leaders came together to create the idea behind the sports festival. We have to focus on the need to maintain the unity of this country, we need to focus on patriotism; we need to engage our youths and get them more active in sports. We also need to have a mechanism for tapping sports talents.
There are so much talents in this country especially at the grassroots level. But we don’t have that mechanism that will help us get there, this is what the sports festival is all about.
“Everything you do has its own challenges. The capacity to get everything done. Financing could be a problem but there is no problem that cannot be overcome if you start planning early.
“We don’t have a committee yet and we have not finalised the budget but we have some seed money which we have appropriated in this year’s budget. But as I said earlier, the 2020 festival is going to be driven largely by the private sector. So we expect that we should have positive returns,” the governor said.
