By Jude Opara, Abuja

As more Nigerians continue to react to the appointment of Mallam Alhassan Yakmut as the acting Director General of the National Sports Commission, a former African champion in the 200 metres race, Christy Opara has advised him to lay a solid foundation for the true development of sports from the grassroots. She spoke to Sports Vanguard in an exclusive chat.

Yakmut

Opara who is currently managing a sports development outfit known as SOHO 24 in Abuja decried what she termed the consistent dwindling fortunes of the country in sports especially athletics blaming it on the failure of successive administrations to pay adequate attention to the identification and development of the young athletes.

Using athletics as an example, Opara who was also a Commonwealth Games winner noted that the only name that is making Nigeria proud today is Blessing Okagbare as against the situation in her time where there were a lot of quality athletes both male and female that always represented the country.

“Let us use my own area athletics as an example, in my time there was Mary Onyeali, Beatrice Utondu, Falilat Ogunkoya, the Ezinwa brothers; Davidson and Osmond, Deji Aliu, Innocent Egbunike, Yusuf Ali to mention but a few, but today it is only Blessing Okagbare that we hear her name all the time, as a nation we are supposed to have a pull of grade ‘A’ athletes so that when some retire, there will be others to immediately take their place.

“Also in those days when I was growing up in my little community, there were recreational centres from where we went to the state and from the state we became national athletes where we were put in camps. If we must improve we must go back to the basics.

They must create sport academies and also encouraging individuals that have invested their own time and money in that area. Inter-house sports that we had in those have all disappeared and we are only doing trial and error and that is why we are where we are today.”

Opara also rubbished the elite athletes’ programme of the NSC saying they are only paying lip services to it because they have not truly taken a decision to encourage the athletes like they do in other countries that are strong factors in sports.

“I am running a sports development centre and the day I commissioned it, the NSC did not even attend, no representation and we have a minister and DG. I have seen the national stadium; there is no place for the athletes there, they are not well trained and they don’t even feed them well, so the story we left with 20 years ago is still the story that is been told today, so I do not believe there is such programme because I challenge anybody from there to prove me wrong.”

She however expressed confidence that the new director general of the NSC, Alhassan Yakmut will do things differently given the fact that he was also an athlete by most importantly making the development and welfare of the athletes his priority at all times.