Stakeholders fault new sports policy
Stakeholders in the sports sector have faulted the National Sports Industry Policy drafted by the Ministry of Youth and Sports Development.
The draft of the sports policy was submitted to the Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Sunday Dare, July 28.
Dare, while receiving the draft of the policy in Abuja, described the development as a milestone with the capacity to change sports business in Nigeria.
But some stakeholders picked loopholes in the draft of the policy.
Head of CAF Safety and Security, Christian Emeruwa, observed that critical stakeholders were left out of the policy drafting process, adding that the document was too voluminous.
“You came up with a document of over 170 pages; first the policy document is too voluminous. Secondly, when you look at the policy document, you will find out that there are some things that shouldn’t be there,” Emeruwa said in an interview with AIT.
“I know the intentions, but unfortunately, they are unable to articulate the intentions properly. You consulted over 800 stakeholders and when I look at the list of those you considered stakeholders, I found out that NAPHER-SD (Nigeria Association of Physical Health Education Recreation, Dance and Sport) was not there, Sports Writers Association of Nigeria was not part of the stakeholders, presidents of sports federations as a cluster was not there, secretaries general of sports federation were not there, the states that you intend to implement these policies, commissioners of sports of these state were never invited as a cluster, sports marketers were never invited as a cluster.
“Even other stakeholders that you might think are not important – supporters’ club – they are also stakeholders in sports, they were never invited. You also talk about coaches association, the athletes that they were planning all these for; their association was not represented at any point in the list of 800 stakeholders.”
Secretary-General of NAPHER-SD, Franz Atare, in an interview with NTA said, “The three Is and the P, which were the cardinal points of this administration, were not included in the policy.
In an interview with our correspondent, Lagos State SWAN Chairman, Debo Oshundun, said the ministry lacked the capacity to implement the policy that was drafted.
“If you are going to work on sports policy, you have to call the stakeholders to have input in it, but that wasn’t the case.
“The point is that Nigeria never lacks anything about paper policy; it’s the implementation that has always been our problem. All those voluminous policies can be streamlined into three or four pages that would be meaningful,” he told The PUNCH.
“What I think we need to do as a nation is to go back to school sports where the retired athletes were discovered. When you don’t have a policy that can work with education, we will keep having problems. The school sports department must be returned to the ministry of sports from the education ministry, because there, they only see sports as a recreation and not business.
“All those things are there, they don’t need any new sports policy, we just need to sit down, be truthful to ourselves and reorganise everything, not to carry all manner of people that don’t know anything about sports and say they should draft a sports policy. What do they know about sports development? How many professionals do they have in the committee that drafted the policy?” he added. Punch
