Commonwealth Games: Sports ministry officials sideline NOC in Birmingham

Power-play is the name of the game with the Nigerian contingent at the ongoing 2022 Commonwealth Games in Birmingham as the Ministry of Youth and Sports Development is showing who’s boss to the Nigerian Olympic Committee (NOC).

The norm at major sporting events like the African, Olympic and Commonwealth games is that the National Olympic Committee of each participating country takes charge of all activities of their contingent.

Not us, Nigerians!

For starters, the Nigerian Olympic Committee knew nothing about how the country’s athletes were flown to Birmingham.

And if you want to pick any grouse with the kits you’ll see our athletes don at these games, don’t ask the NOC too because they can’t explain how the kits were procured too.

The Ministry of Youth and Sports Development is fully in charge of the Nigerian contingent here and the NOC members are just a rung above the spectators at the games.

But this was not the case in the past.

At bygone games, the NOC was the engine room of all activities involving our sportsmen and sportswomen on the continental and global stages.

Former Nigerian internationals would recall how the late Molade Okoya-Thomas led Team Nigeria’s campaign to raise funds for the country’s athletes to participate in major sporting events.

In those days, the NOC was the beehive where sports journalists hunted for news during major events like the Commonwealth Games. This is history now.

Save for keeping up appearances with the Commonwealth Games Federation (CGF), the NOC is virtually absent in Birmingham activities-wise, as the Ministry of Youth and Sports Development calls the shots here.

 Predictably many stakeholders are unhappy with this anomaly.

One of them lamented: “I don’t think we have ever had it so bad. The NOC has now become an appendage of the ministry. The NOC is an agency which used to raise funds on its own without relying on the ministry.  But what do we have now? The NOC has no say here or in any major competition for that matter. The ministry has taken over. The ministry is now in charge. This is pathetic for sports in Nigeria.”