The 2023 National Youth Games, NYG, has come and gone, but in its footsteps remain the sour taste of Nigerian officials’ penchant for tardy planning and chaotic implementation.
Young athletes representing 35 states landed in Delta, yearning to jump, run and play out their hearts on turfs and tracks they had spent the better part of one year dreaming about. But their excitement quickly evaporated. As usual, Nigeria happened to them at “Asaba 2023.”
But first, let us take the good news. Supposedly a competition for young Nigerian male and female athletes, whose age range spanned 10 to 20 years old, 2023 NYG usually provided a platform for fresh athletic discoveries. Host Delta State shone with an overall medal haul of 116. The medal haul crowned Delta State as back-to-back winners for the seventh time.
Team Delta bagged:
- 51 gold
- 34 silver
- 31 bronze.
Lagos State came second with a total of 61 medals:
- 21 gold
- 19 silver
- 21 bronze.
Edo State came third with 53 medals.
- 21 gold
- 15 silver
- 17 bronze.
Here comes the bad news. A festival, for which organisers had 12 months to plan, quickly degenerated into a Hammer House of Horror. Delta State won the right to host the commission since last year, but the state sports commission went about preparations rather tardily and it soon showed.
Shortly after the opening ceremony, the gate at the main bowl of the Stephen Keshi Stadium in Asaba collapsed, injuring fans, officials and athletes. The fallen gate served as a befitting prognosis for the poor state of facilities athletes found themselves laden with. Where the hosts provided hostel accommodation, the place was poor and horrible. Hostels were overcrowded with young athletes sleeping on mattresses laid on the floor. In addition, sportsmen in the camps suffered from poor feeding conditions, poor water supply and epileptic electricity supply. Three states shared one toilet.
In that generally unhygienic environment, how would any stars shine? Few did. At the end, NYG recorded no broken national records.
Officials secretly pointed at the commission’s Chairman (who was Chairman of the Local Organising Committee, LOC) as the scapegoat who messed things up despite “huge sums of money budgeted for the event.” The LOC boss and Chairman of the Delta State Sports Commission was Tonobok Okowa, younger brother to the state’s immediate past Governor Ifeanyi Okowa.
With all the hotels and hospitality facilities available in Asaba, the LOC curiously hinged its accommodation plan on school hostels. Who does that? As things turned out, schools came into session at the same time as the games. Okowa’s defence is that full-bed hostels for over 4,500 athletes became a herculean task due to shifting of the games earlier scheduled for September 7, 2023, when schools were still on holiday. Postponements led the games to begin from September 20, 2023 through September 30, 2023.
That cast a sad commentary on a platform that should have served as hunting grounds for the country’s next generation of world-class athletes.
The horror has ended. Competitors and officials alike agree on one point: May Nigeria never witness another sports disgrace like the Asaba 2023 national youth games.