The reception we received in both villages was incredible. I was dumbfounded by the recognition and appreciation of Jay Jay Okocha by Nigerians everywhere! Not even in my over thirty years of being in the limelight of Nigerian celebrity was I prepared for the noise and frenzy around Jay Jay everywhere. The people poured out from every nook and cranny to catch a glimpse of the football magician as word spread that we were in the vicinity. The few security men we took with us could hardly control the throng of humanity that flooded the streets in torrents, all desiring to take pictures or shake the hands with the football hero. In the course of our assignment we met several young boys and girls, in school and out of school, and had conversations with them on the cause of the high rate of out-of-school children in Nigeria. At the moment Nigeria has the highest number of out-of-school children in the world – anywhere between 8 and 16 million of them, with the vast majority in northern Nigeria. Could this have a bearing on the level of insecurity, conflicts and crisis in that part of the country?
We also encountered young girls, ages ranging from 6 to about 12, carrying wares for sale on their heads and walking the streets when other children were in school. We met young boys collecting refuse with push carts, and others selling ‘pure water’ sachets. One of them confessed he left junior secondary school when his father died as he could no longer afford to pay his fees. We met Mariam, a remarkable 25-year old woman who started primary school at 22, is now in the fourth year, studying with children 15 or more years her junior. Of particular interest to us were some football players in Pyakasa Government Basic and Junior Secondary school. Jay Jay had a brief play around with the school’s female and male football teams. In less than 10 minutes of actual play I saw two outstanding football players in the school’s team. Both of them want to be like Jay Jay and Kanu and intend to turn professional and play in Europe. But remarkably unlike the general trend amongst young boys with a passion for football, Hezekiah and Awalu are determined to get a proper education even as they play football. Hezekiah, the younger of the two from Zaria wants to be a medical doctor and intends to go to university. In this same environment we found young boys and girls that will not go to school because their parents disallow them from doing so. These parents do not appreciate the value of formal education and would rather use their children to provide extras for the family through selling, trading, farming and so on. What we found is that none of the children was unwilling to go to school if given the opportunity.
There is, therefore, a whole army of unemployed, illiterate, idle youth in several northern cities and communities waiting for something to happen to their lives. Sports could provide them with that outlet. The northern youths have tremendous passion for cinema and football in particular and would do anything to have the opportunity of a kick around on a football field. I have known this most of my life and saw many of them in the two little villages we visited. The traditional leaders of the villages were not left out of the ‘carnival’. They gathered all their traditional chiefs to meet with us and to share in the unique and God-sent experience of meeting with Jay Jay Okocha.
I see Jay Jay and several popular players of his generation having a great role to play in the social and economic reformation of this country using sports, particularly football. Every young boy with talent in sport has a global field to sell his talent and achieve economic emancipation. Just as the 1-Goal project has discovered the potency of the game of football to pursue the largest global campaign on the rights of all children to education so also must Nigeria exploit sports and its array of accomplished football heroes to drive the eradication of illiteracy, hunger and poverty amongst the youths of northern of Nigeria. Football can help as a tool to drive that campaign. It can also serve as an incentive to lure children to school and keep them there. I have said it over and over again that the population of the northern youths can be converted into a rich source of an endless stream of the largest number of extra-ordinarily gifted sports persons, particularly footballers. I look at the crisis in Jos, for example, and I see the handiwork of youths that are idle and brainwashed into taking up arms against their neighbours on the altar of ethnicity, religion, and social discontentment! Whereas we can use the same youths to turn this orgy of violent conduct into an ecstasy of celebration, of friendship, of healthy competition, of economic emancipation and of success on the sports field.
Northern youths are being ignorantly turned into weapons of destruction, their idle minds now occupied by values that do not edify the human spirit. I see plenty of opportunities to start an authentic alteration of the attitudinal tendencies of northern parents to the education of their children. The 1-Goal project sets out to join with other groups with similar intentions to take the campaign to every nook and cranny! The message has to be reinforced through the door-to-door, village-to-village campaign that we have embarked on. The journey will be long and hard but from what I saw this past week and the effect of Jay Jay on the people that do not come from the part of the country he comes from, people in the villages and towns, I repeat for the umpteenth time that, with the support of State Governments that remain the major source of all the funding in this part of the country, football can turn this present wasteland into a forest of sporting talent through the schools. We can install in every community the spirit and sense of ‘football and education’ in combination, providing them with the ingredients within which this growth can take place – facilities, institutions, programmes, personnel and challenges that will ensure that enough work is done over the next 5 years to guarantee that every northern child is in one school or the other. It may seem like an impossible dream, but I have seen the possibilities this past week in the examples of Hezekiah (13 years old) and Anwalu (12) in the little village of Pyakasa! Remember those names in the future. In one of the Nigeria’s national teams.
Sports Network Initiative – a tool of reform in Nigerian sports
At last, this next week, the gathering of institutional stakeholders in sports will take place in Lagos. The group made up of the leaderships of NUGA, NIPOGA, NICEGA, NPUGA, NSSF, Diaspora sportsmen, and some invited potential affiliates, shall be looking at documents that could forge them into a formidable alliance of some sort, to drive the development of sports through the institutions. It will help sort out once and for all the common registration and documentation of sports persons, starting with footballers, in all institutions on a yearly basis. There is the faint possibility that if the NFF looks at the details of the organisation, it could team up with it to exploit the opportunity SNI provides to reduce to the barest minimum and eventually eliminate the tendency for cheating, falsification of documents and ages. The SNI is working in conjunction with a bank that shall manage the funds raised from all the participating sports constituencies to provide documentation, registration, insurance and banking facilities.
