Memo To Solomon Dalung, Sports Minister -By Fenny Fwa

Permit me to convey my belated warmest congratulations on your well deserved appointment as the minister of Youth and Sports. I’m saying well deserved in every sense of the word because you have been a social activist whose views on the less privileged are well known. Before Boko Haram became monstrous you had always advocated the modified version of OBJ stick and carrot approach that the insurgency can only be conquered through dialogue and persuasion. I also had the rare privileged of traveling with you by air from Abuja to Yola where we had intensive conversation on the problems bedeviling the nation. I was highly impressed with your passion for this country. It is with these in mind that I’m pretty sure PMB took the right decision in making you a minister of the federal republic and capping it with assigning an appropriate portfolio of Youth and Sports.

I have waited patiently to listen to your template for this very important assignment bestowed on you, but to no avail. This is further compounded by the scanty policy thrust of the APC on youth development as contained in their manifesto. The manifesto simply says it would create 20, 000 jobs per state. For those with SSCE they will participate in technology and vocational training. It will also pay unemployed youth a stipend of N5,000 per month.

As far as I’m concerned, the task before you is most daunting and challenging and therefore requires a lot of mental, human and material resources to accomplish. The gloomy situation is captured thus: 70 million of the about 170 million population of Nigeria are youth. 80% of the youth are unemployed according to CBN. This population is the energy room of the country and therefore their effective utilisation will bring about monumental economic transformation while failure will bring about all kinds of social vices such as armed robbery, kidnapping, drug addiction and trafficking, militancy, prostitution, cultism, ritual killings and insurgency. All the vices mentioned are heavily imbedded in our social life today and these have aided immensely to socio-economic stagnation we are witnessing today

Sir it will not be out of place to urge you to work assiduously to address these myriad of problems of the youth. This is why I said your job is most challenging and requires all the brains, the energy and resources you can muster in order to give the youth a new lease of life.

My modest contribution to your job at hand is to request you to work hand in hand with the Ministry of Labour and Productivity, which is solely responsible for job creation, to   immediately create an agency for youth empowerment programme. Alternatively you should liaise with the Ministry of Labour to revive the National Directorate of Employment. The agency should be saddled with the responsibility of collating statistics of all unemployed youth state by state with their qualification and thereafter liaise with job creating ministries such as ministries of Works, Power, Housing, Agriculture and Solid Minerals to give these youth appropriate jobs. For instance you can put up a policy that any firm that secures a multi billion naira contract must employ a minimum of 100 graduates in the relevant fields.

On the issue of the policy of the APC to pay a stipend of 5,000 naira to unemployed youth, all hands must be on deck to work out the modalities for its execution. Most importantly the funding which may involve raising taxes from companies, international donor agencies and of course the sum of N500 billion set side by the federal government for job creation in the proposed 2016 budget. I’m not opposed to paying certain stipend for the unemployed, but I doubt if the money set aside would carter for millions of the unemployed which may run into trillions of naira. To avoid failure in the execution of the project due to shortage of funds, I humbly submit the money so earmarked rather than pay stipends which may not reach all should rather be channelled towards empowering them by giving out loans after analysing their business proposals which shall be given mostly by buying plants, equipment and materials with minimum amount in cash. Other measures should be pursued to ensure that our youth are gainfully employed to keep them off the streets to serve as panacea against heinous crimes.

One of the most productive sectors in any nation’s development is sports. Sports bring about the physical and mental development of human beings. This informs the reason why developed nations pay a lot of attention to sports development which has contributed to having a productive work force that have performed social, economic and political miracles. It is in this context that I read the APC manifesto from cover to cover to see if there is policy direction for sports but I found none. Sir, you have not helped matters by keeping mute on the main policy thrust of your ministry as it concerns sports three month after being sworn in. Of course you have been emphasizing grassroots development of sports. May be when you finish the ongoing facilities tour you will unfold the blue print on sports development.

Whenever you are ready to unfold your programmes, you may incorporate some of these few synopsis that may assist in fashioning out desirable policies for our sports development.

All hands must be on deck to develop our sports infrastructures to bring them to world standard. National sports festival and school sports must be revived. Training of our sports managers must be top priority. This will enable them impart the requisite knowledge to our sports men and women in order to excel.

The most critical sport that will not only enrich our sports men and women, but contribute to our economic growth is football which has been neglected for long.

In this world of maximizing your potentials to enrich your country, it has become desirable to harness our partially tapped potentials in football to getting maximum results. Sir, it will interest you to know that despite our in efficient football management, Nigeria is the fifth exporter of football with 598 of footballers playing abroad. We can reach the number of Brazil the highest in the world with 1,784. With these number of players, Brazilian international footballers inject billions of dollars into the economy when they repatriate the millions of dollars they make in playing football.

In 2014, Indian work force abroad sent $70 billion home which is about three times our annual budget of about N4 trillion. Nigeria is not doing badly in that regard as our work force abroad sent $21 billion as at 2014. With appropriate measures put in place, our players will add some billions in funds being repatriated from abroad.

There is also the substandard nature of our league. From the bad pitches to poor officiating and also poor renumeration of our players, government cannot raise the standard of our league, but can create enabling environment. Consequently, sir, as minister of sports, you should mobilise the private sector to not only own football teams but develop the facilities and pay players handsomely in order to make the league attractive. Honourable Minister, you must reach out to people like Dangote, Mike Adenuga of GLO, BUA, and other bigger conglomerates such as MTN, Airtel, oil companies to come together and invest in our football league that will assure them profits in the long run. If Egypt and Tunisia who are not as rich as us could run profitable leagues I see no reason why we can not.

–Fwa wrote in from Adamawa State Ministry of Information, Yola.