This picture was taken 25 years ago. I was 20, and angling to take my school – University of Abuja – to NUGA Games. This picture was taken at the regional qualifiers that held that year, 1999, in Maiduguri. In truth, I wasn’t fighting fit. But I qualified at Maiduguri and went on to Kaduna for NUGA, where I lost in the quarter finals.
A conversation with my younger brother, Yaga – 2003 National champion, 2007 African champion, and 2008 Olympic bronze medallist – sparked this memory.
My own career was nowhere as illustrious. You see? I had the disadvantage of going to a University that didn’t even go to NUGA at all, till my 4th year. So I missed out on active competition for those years, and became rusty. Still, being the 4th child – coming behind 3 older ones who all, in their own time, became National Champions – I knew I had to go there and try. So, after NUGA, I struck out for the National Sports Festival. And that was where I had my firsthand experience of what Nigerian athletes go through.
I made the Abuja contingent. We trained at Old Parade Ground. Those who had come from outside Abuja also slept there. These were national athletes, sleeping on the floor.
When it was time to go to Bauchi, we crowded into a small danfo. We didn’t make it there in one day. That transit night, I folded myself into a small ball so I could fit unto the seat of a broken desk, discarded under a tree. This was where I slept.
In Bauchi, our ‘athletes camp’ was a dilapidated classroom. We all slept on the floor through the whole competition. This was a competition for Nigeria’s elite athletes.
I made it all the way to the final, where in the second round I took a direct punch to the face. (In Taekwondo, punches to the face are not allowed.) My corner coach took a look at my face and decided to throw in the towel. I went straight to the clinic. The punch had cracked one of my molars and slightly indented my cheek bone. The doctor said I was lucky it missed my eye.
There was not much in that clinic. If it had been a fight for my life, I would have lost it. Just like in Maiduguri, the previous year, where I had watched my brother – exhausted from the heat – stagger out of the ring and fall to his knees. There was no water, no glucose, no nothing. Athletes were on their own.
Nigerian athletes are on their own. They run, they fight, they jump, they lift – on their own. While they struggle, no one cares. If they lose, no one cares. But if they win, hah! If they win, people will use their exploits to write speeches on the ‘Nigerian spirit’.
I get it. When my brother fell in Azerbaijan, during his London 2012 Olympic qualifiers, and his opponent wickedly stepped on his face and broke his nose, I wrote a poem about his warrior heart, and how it picked him up from that adversity, and pushed him on to win. I get it.
But poetry never robbed me of clarity at the systemic injustice of it all. Monkey work, Baboon chop. True. It is no exaggeration, but the Nigerian state – with its convoy-driving, mansion-building, estacode-pocketing, contingent-populating agents – is not deserving of the Nigerian athlete.
For this reason, my joy at the victory of Nigerian athletes is always constrained by a secret desire that it didn’t happen. Because the state will claim it. The state that was not there in the athlete’s struggle. Only when there is something to be reaped, something it did not plant, only there will you find the Nigerian state. True. That is what leadership today in Nigeria is fast becoming – parasitic. Feeding so voraciously off society, society is dying.
Who cares?
I quit competitive Taekwondo that day in Bauchi. Because I realized that it was not what I was willing to die doing. It was not my purpose. I have since found my purpose, wherein my own warrior heart is activated.
I care.
By Dike Chukwumerije
