By Patrick Omorodion

Perturbed by the current confusion and rot in the country’s sports sector, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) has taken up the gauntlet to salvage the sector through a Special Prayer/Thanksgiving Service on Sunday.

The event which will hold at its Headquarters in Ebute Meta area of Lagos will be presided over by the church’s General Overseer, Pastor Enoch Adeboye, to ask God to revive Nigeria’s sports and bring back its lost glory, Paul Bankole, Director of Sports of the RCCG disclosed in Lagos.

According to Mr Bankole, the RCCG became concerned in the decline of the sports sector because “not too long ago Nigeria enjoyed reasonable respect within the international sporting community, participating regularly in every competition of note and giving a fair account of itself in these competitions.”

Stressing that the problem of Nigeria’s sports was both spiritual and physical, Mr Bankole said that things like “age falsification, fetishism, corruption/fraud, moral decadence, winning at all costs, violence, demonic covenants, favouritism and insensitivity of some churches towards sports” contributed to the present decay in the sector.

He equally blamed the extinction of boarding house systems in schools which caused the collapse of the inter-schools sports system, disappearance of Physical Education from the curriculum of schools, dilapidation of sports facilities and unsound sports policy among other things, as the bane of sports in the country today.

The Pastor of the RCCG National Headquarters, Richard Anyiam particularly mentioned the crisis in football as one of the things the church will pray against to restore the country’s glory in the area.

“The NFF crisis is a show of shame, things have really gone haywire. If we can take care of the spiritual problem, everything in the physical will fall in place. We will not pray for football only but all the sports,” he said.

He said that Pastor Adeboye who was recently conferred with the Spiritual Pillar of Sports award by the National Association of Nigerian Footballers (NANF) and Save Nigeria Sports Initiative (SANSI), is happy to be associated with sports.