By Patrick Omorodion

Nigeria has never lacked great men with sound mind, men who could think out of the box and give great ideas with which the country would have attained its potential as a true giant of Africa in deeds and not in words.

What we have in great abundance are mediocre administrators in every sphere of our national life, whose priority is not how to make the nation great but how they will shortchange the country for their selfish benefits.

Once these selfish individuals who could make Satan cringe with fear at the thought of their wicked acts mount the saddle of authority, they will only promote their kind as their eternal successors and pull down any good man who they feel will come and dismantle their structure of corruption which helps in the destruction of the country.

One such great mind who is always thinking about how to place Nigeria on the world map in sports but who has always been blocked by evil men in the corridors of sports administration is Chief (Dr ) Patrick Olusegun Odegbami (MON).

Since my path and his crossed in the 1990s through his pet project, football competition for secondary schools which the Shell Petroleum Development Company keyed into and named Shell Cup, I have never doubted his sincerity of purpose.

Big Seg, as Chief Odegbami is fondly called, is one Nigerian who is always pained when the Super Eagles are not doing well and will not hesitate to say his mind no matter whose ox is gored.

Again last week, he stated reasons why the senior national team which parades a legion of good players from among some of the best clubs in Europe are not doing well on home soil. One of the reasons he adduced is the evil machinations of some selfish administrators he chose to call ‘wicked’.

Every football stakeholder knows that a good playing turf is an added advantage for a good set of players to display their talent and put what they learned in training sessions to practice.

You can then imagine when administrators chosen to help develop sports in the country connive to destroy facilities because of what they stand to gain.

Chief Odegbami told a story of how an Israeli firm hired to replace the playing surface of the Liberty stadium in Ibadan now renamed Obafemi Awolowo stadium when Nigeria wanted to host the FIFA U-20 World Championship in 1995 told the administrators that the turf was a very good one. To the firm, what the pitch needed was first-class maintenance by qualified professionals.

Rather than heed the advice of the foreign experts they brought, our administrators went ahead and told them they want the turf replaced. At least money has been budgeted and released for the job and it must not be returned to the government.

In Odegbami’s lamentation, he wrote “what they had brought to replace the playing surface of the stadium was inferior to what they met on ground. Wicked sports administrators at the time, blinded by greed and ignorance, insisted that the destruction job must go on. 

The evil deed was done, and was extended to (the other stadia in) Calabar, Kaduna, Enugu and so on.

Their handiwork can still be found spread all over these stadia, carcasses of what were monuments to great and lush grass turfs of old”.

While they destroyed the playing surfaces and thus put the football career of generations of Nigerian youths in jeopardy, the ‘wicked’ administrators smiled to the banks with their loot.

And the result till today, according to Odegbami, who never ceases to think about how Nigeria will become the standard for other African countries is that “the ghost of those times has continued to haunt football development in the country to this day”.

I had a similar experience with my namesake on the same issue of ‘wicked’ administrators. I was part of sports journalists that went round with the FIFA inspection team to venues chosen as centres for the FIFA event in 1999 after the world football body, then under Brazilian, Joao Havelange had withdrawn the hosting right initially granted Nigeria in 1995.

Even though FIFA blamed the withdrawal on an outbreak of meningitis in some parts of the country then, many Nigerians believed that it was because the country’s facilities were not fully ready.

Havelange’s successor, Sepp Blatter and then CAF president Issa Hayatou had worked had to restore Nigeria’s hosting right in 1999 and so put one of FIFA ‘s vice president, Jack Warner from Trinidad and Tobago as head of its inspection team.

I remember when the team visited Ibadan, and saw the football pitch of the International Institute of Tropical Agriculture (IITA) that was earmarked as practice pitch for teams drawn to play their group matches there, they wondered why Nigeria was going to Kenya to import grass for our National Stadia to be used for the competition when they could have just traveled to Ibadan for a better quality grass.

The FIFA officials were thinking like human beings who wanted us to cut cost and still have better quality grass but the Nigerians who were in-charge were thinking like the devil who the Bible tells us in John chapter 10 and verse 10 is the thief that comes only to steal, kill and destroy.

That is the only reason why the administrators at that time, and even till today would ignore expert advice and steal the country’s resources, kill the future of our athletes by destroying the avenues through which they can hone their skills and be raised to stardom for the benefit of the country and themselves at the long run.

The destruction continued in 2009 when FIFA again gave us the right to host its U-17 World Cup which Spain won to announce to the world that they have arrived and tired of being perpetual underachievers. Of course they went ahead to win the 2010 World Cup, the first on African soil in South Africa. That year, the ‘wicked’ administrators took the destruction to a new level, this time not importing inferior grass from Kenya but removing natural grass and replacing them with synthetic surfaces, which was a new found route to siphon taxpayers money. Today all the synthetic surfaces have been replaced.

And it hasn’t stopped till today because the sports ministry is still spending huge sums to re-grass the pitch of the  Moshood Abiola National Stadium in Abuja. Yet the pitch gets bald because of poor maintenance. 

I wonder how the Sports Minister, Sunday Dare feels today after spending millions of Naira to refurbish the playing turf, yet the surface remains a nightmare for footballers to string good passes.