The National Sports Festival began 1973 with the sole aim of promoting unity amongst the ethnic groups in the country after the Civil War as well as to discover hidden talents that can be harnessed and groomed for the future. Thirty nine years down the road, the aims and objectives of the founders have been truncated.

In 1988 Mexican football fell to the lowest point in its history. After fielding four over-age players in the qualifiers for the Under-20 World Cup, FIFA decided to ban all the country’s national teams from international football for the next two years. Apparently, the men in charge at the time didn’t trust the quality of young talent in the country and resorted to cheating in order to achieve decent results in the international arena.

How best can one pay tribute to the memory of the great Oloye, the undisputed king maker of Kwara State and former Senate leader, the late Dr. Abubarkar Olusola Saraki, the Waziri of Ilorin?

When I saw the headline ’22m malnourished in Nigeria, others’’, my reaction was ‘Not Again!’. Throughout our civil war, and many years after it ended, whenever some foreign media houses wrote anything on Nigeria, they would publish pictures of badly malnourished people, especially children with Kwashiokor, along with the news item.

Boxing coach, Pa George Anyanwu has lamented the poor treatment meted out to Nigerian boxing coaches in the last couple of years after toiling to bring about good direction to the sport.