African Comment: Mismanaging An Abundance Of Talents In Nigeria

Entertainment@Large's Obinna Anyanwu believes that a huge amount of football talent goes to waste in Africa's most populated country.

I sat through a spirited championship of public primary school pupils last week in Lekki, a fast growing suburb of Lagos. For over two hours, I watched amazing football skills from the feet of these kids who got a rare opportunity to play organised football at the very high brow Fun Turf.

The competition, sponsored by the Lekki Concession Company, was meant to unearth young talents and give them an opportunity to show their skills. The most impressive ones were rewarded

At every touch of skill, I could hear the commentator’s scream as he always made a point of telling everyone that the kids will be recommended to national team coach Samson Siasia for inclusion in the future Super Eagles. It sounded funny most times.

The truth is that Nigeria possesses such an amazing pool of talented footballers that are hardly ever given an enabling environment to blossom. Many of the big names in Nigerian football today started out playing, not on lush green pitches like many of their global counterparts, but on dangerous dusty plots of land.

The abundance of football talents in Nigeria was brought closer home with the statement last week by Nigerian footballer Henry Makinwa, who claimed that many of his compatriots that wanted to play professional football are now stranded in Europe with nowhere to turn.

Many of them cannot return home as failures and have opted to remain in Europe to do menial jobs just to be able to keep body and soul. And anyone who has lived through the European winter knows that it is better living in the warmth of tropical Africa than scraping through life with little protection from the harsh elements.

However, one thing that I got from Makinwa’s statement is the need for the league at home to be developed to the level where it will become very rewarding for Nigerian players to play in their country.

This would ensure that they would not have to commit their lives into the hands of unscrupulous football agents who will abandon them in unknown countries after having promised to find them clubs to play abroad.

I had an encounter with a stranded Nigerian player in Accra, Ghana two years ago. A skillful and talented midfielder, Lanre Omisore came to Accra because he was told by an agent he could get to Europe easily from Ghana.

It was not the first time he was being told this because he had already been as far as Sudan to try and get a club that would mean his ultimate transfer to Europe. This time around in Accra, Lanre was made to undergo trials in a couple of first division clubs, but he was never signed. And then his agent took off, leaving him alone in a country where he had no relatives, friends or means to live and strive towards his footballing ambitions.

A friend who met Lanre brought him to me and we raised funds to buy him a bus ticket back to Lagos and to his family. He is still playing football.

It is sad just thinking that a couple of those kids I watched playing at the Lekki tournament will one day end up like Lanre in pursuit of stardom in Europe because there are no proper channels to ensure they get into clubs that will give them livelihood in Nigeria.

And many of them will become stranded in Europe when they eventually get there because they will be surplus to requirements. Many will not come back home because they will feel like failures in the eyes of their family members.

Even still, many of them will abandon football in search of better opportunities and ensure that the country keeps losing its best legs. Unless the Nigerian football authorities begin to put in proper plans to fully tap the potential of the many talents that abound in the country through the funding of grassroots football, a huge number of our talents will continue to elude us and our football will be the poorer for it.