Africa’s leading stadium construction outfit CEO Ebi Egbe has lauded the covetous impact of the minister for youth and sports development, Sunday Dare as he credits the growth and development of Nigeria sport to the amiable sports minister.
Egbe revealed in an online question and answer chat with journalists, “the sports minister, Sunday Dare is doing a very great job, with his innovative ideas into the Nigeria sport, changes are coming, by the time we get the Abuja National stadium working, Nigeria will see that for once we have a dynamic sports minister who knows what growth means in terms of meeting up with the 21st-century facilities.”
Over the years, there have been several complaints of the focus of appointed sports minister and ministry sole focus on football despite the varieties of sports in the country but duly neglected by the arms in charge.
“We have started changing narratives right now because Sunday Dare does not only concentrate on football, he’s working on all sport and bent on taking the sport back to schools to develop the grassroots sport in Nigeria. So I think with the minister who has a vision, a plan of what he wants to do, an achiever who doesn’t want to fail. Am pretty sure in no distance time, we will start seeing school sports in Nigeria.”
He further advice concerning the development of sport in Nigeria as he tasked the ministry to go back to the root, “We have to go back to school sport and construct facilities, let’s take the sport back to the schools, then we will solve our problem in Nigeria and make sure in every local government, you have three to four sports centers with good ball field, athletic trial, good basketball court, sports hall and see what will happen, we will make top Olympics Champion in Nigeria, let’s take the sport back to school.
Egbe also called out the Government who runs most of the football clubs in Nigeria, “most of the sports clubs in Nigeria, Government have to understand that sport is big business so they need to start concentrating on the business part of the sport and bring technocrats to man their commissions and states who still run the ministry of sport should diversify and change to a commission because it’s obvious that once the sport is under government, it’s difficult for it to excel. Let us try to distance the government from our sporting activities, the sports ministry should be changed to sports commission, this will create an avenue for governments to appoint technocrats instead of political commissions.”
“Once it is a commission, the governor has a right to appoint anybody with the state understanding that sport is a public sector; it’s in the eyes of the public. So if you bring someone who understands the sport, it will be easy to use sport as an idea-generating sector for any state government and that’s what I advised in my state in Bayelsa. We should look at sports business, not funding a football team with one hundred million, and at the end of the day, you get nothing, it doesn’t make sense to me. It’s high time we begin to focus on the business part of football and bring technocrat to man the sports sector in all the states in Nigeria,” he ended.
