President Tinubu, fix the structural crisis in Nigerian sports
By Anonymous Source.
Many Nigerians expected that when President Bola Tinubu, a passionate sports lover and my fellow Manchester United fan, took office, the sports sector would finally receive the attention it desperately needed. With such personal passion for sports, it was only natural to assume that our sector would flourish under his watch. Unfortunately, almost three years down the line, the opposite is the case. Instead of progress, the sector is moving in a confusing direction.
The very first step the President took in sports was concerning, especially with the appointment of Senator John Enoh, a man better known for his background in agriculture, as Minister of Sports. From the beginning, many insiders warned that the sector needed a technocrat, not a newcomer. The concerns eventually became reality. Enoh supervised a tenure marked by monumental failure and lack of direction, culminating in a shambolic show at the last Olympic Games.
Trying to correct that, the President later dissolved the Sports Ministry, brought back the National Sports Commission (NSC), and appointed Shehu Dikko as Chairman and Bukola Olopade as Director General.
While reinstating the NSC was widely welcomed, I think scrapping the ministry entirely has created even bigger problems. As it stands today, the entire sports sector has no seat at the Federal Executive Council, meaning there is no one speaking for sports at the highest level of government. This is a huge setback because, historically, the NSC has always been housed inside a ministry, whether Sports and Social Development, Youth and Sports, or Sports and Culture. I sincerely think removing that structure has left a vacuum. Worse still, Section 1, subsection 2 (d) of the NSC Act 2023 clearly states that the Permanent Secretary of the supervising ministry must sit on the NSC Board. That alone tells you the law never anticipated a situation where the ministry would not exist at all.
And yet, more than a year after reviving the NSC, the President has not constituted the Board as required by law. This is why things appear scattered. The truth is, the NSC Act does not give the Chairman any executive powers; he is not supposed to be the one running the place every day. That responsibility belongs to the Director-General, who is meant to handle daily operations and overall management. But because the structure is incomplete and the Board has not been properly constituted, the lines of authority are now completely blurred. Instead of a clear chain of command, the whole Commission is operating in confusion, and that is exactly why things look disorganised today.
The appointment of Shehu Dikko as Chairman also calls for serious concerns. Many still remember how the league struggled during the LMC era. Critics point out that he inherited sponsors, TV rights and commercial partners, but by the time he was sacked by the then Sports Minister, Sunday Dare, everything had collapsed. I wonder why someone who allegedly could not successfully manage one section of the sports ecosystem has now been given the responsibility of overseeing the entire sector.
Meanwhile, the NSC is receiving money Nigeria has never seen in sports before. The budget reportedly jumped from about N9 billion to over N100 billion under NSC. Yet what results can we point to?
Our national stadiums are still in poor condition. The Super Eagles are still playing home matches in the Akwa Ibom state-owned stadium instead of a functional federal facility. Grassroots sports development is still crawling. And the federations are still battling acute funding challenges. So the question is: how can funding increase so dramatically, yet results remain stagnant?
As things stand today, the sports sector urgently needs the President to constitute a proper NSC Board in line with the Act. Without that, there will be no direction, no stability and no accountability. One man cannot stand in place of an entire Board. It is not legal, and it is not sustainable.
Nigeria has too much talent, too much passion and too much potential for sports to be managed with this kind of structural confusion. If the President truly wants real progress, he must first fix these foundational errors. It’s not just about pumping money into the system; the structure has to make sense.
