The performances of Nigerian Athletes at recent tournaments have drastically reduced, leading to a drop in the country’s rankings in athletics among nations in Africa. Ibrahim Shehu Gusau, the new President of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) in this interview with BusinessDay’s Anthony Nlebem, promises to take Nigerian athletics to a level of global competitiveness and also promote the sport from the grassroots, Excerpts:
What do you intend to change in Nigerian athletics?
A lot needs to be done to improve athletics in Nigeria. In my acceptance speech after the election, I spoke about going back to the grassroots, to be honest, we have lost track in what we need to do.
Yes, we have our gold medalist, Blessing Okagbare up there and other athletes doing their best, but we don’t have good young athletes that will take over from them. We need to go back to the grassroots to make sure we discover fresh athletes to compete at every level. Also, we are going to upgrade our coaches in terms of training to what is obtainable in the world. Sports have gone scientific and we need to equip our coaches with the latest techniques.
A lot of turning around needs to be done and this is what we intend to achieve.
What areas of strength are you focusing on?
Nigeria has strength in every part of athletics; it is a massive country with a population of over 180 million people. With the way the country is; we have strength in long distance and short distance races, even swimming and we can produce world champions from them.
It is a matter of discovering these talents, and harnessing them for championships where they can produce medals for the country.
How do you curb the syndrome of ‘last minute’ preparations when going for tournaments?
Yes, there is an issue of fire brigade approach, but we would correct that moving forward. We would make visa applications early for our athletes to give enough time for the concerned embassy to treat those applications. However, we should take cognisance of the politics that plays out, but we will ensure we apply for visas early enough.
I can assure Nigerians that this is a more organized Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) that Nigerians can up to, but we need the support of the government and other relevant stakeholders to move the federation higher.
Any plans to send coaches for refresher courses?
The challenge we are having is funding. In our last trip to London, we took three coaches along with us that attended the coaching conference where they were exposed to the new techniques and innovations in the game.
Our account is red in terms of funding, but we are working on getting funding from sponsors. One of the plans we have locally, is to go back to secondary school games to get the games masters, trained by coaches at the zonal level. We want to bring back the tradition of coaching athletes at a younger age before they come up, organize competitions at zonal, national levels where we will catch them young and groom them for the elite stage.
How do you intend to source for funding?
We are re-strategizing, re-organising and changing focus of AFN to represent a new and better federation that will attract corporate sponsors. Companies should take advantage of the Tax Holiday from Federal Government for sponsoring sports programmes or tournaments.
Also, we are re-strategising in terms of sponsorship; we are looking at companies that will want to take three or four of the athletes as against twenty athletes in supporting them for their programme for the year depending on how big the company is.
How prepared are you for the politics in the Athletics federation?
We have the capabilities and will find ways of navigating through the waters of politics. Before now, Nigeria performed well at championships, suddenly, Kenyans, Ethiopians, South Africans are taking over in terms of athletics. We will get Nigeria back to the top again and we need all the support we can get.
