Editor’s note: This is part one in a four-part series. See the Jamaica Observer’s publication on Monday, September 23, 2024 for part two.

A trip to Jamaica in 2013 to get a first-hand view of the ISSA/GraceKennedy Boys’ and Girls’ Athletics Championships (Champs) lit a spark in Bambo Akani, and 10 years later the first high school track and field championships in many years was staged in the West African country.

As plans are been made for the third staging of what is now the MTN Champs, sponsored by Africa’s biggest telecoms company, the vision is not just to have high school competition in one of the biggest countries on the planet, but to make Nigeria a world powerhouse in track and field.

Akani says his trip to Jamaica was met with scepticism.

“The Jamaicans were like, ‘Oh my gosh, Nigerians are here to learn our secrets,’ ” he said while mentioning that he and his team were on television morning shows and national radio for the entire week.

“We were treated like celebrities in Jamaica and, at the end of it, I saw everything at Champs for the first time and I just had that conviction that somebody has to do this in Nigeria.”

Akani says that if they can get the sport of track and field entrenched in Nigeria at the high school and junior levels, with the abundance of talent in the country they could rival any nation in the medal count at major global championships.

Akani, who is based in the United States and attended the recent World Athletics Under 20 Championships in Lima, Peru, as a media representative, was making a documentary called Making of champions, ironically after Nigeria failed to win a single medal in the 2012 Olympic Games in London.

The founder of Making of Champions sports media and management company in Nigeria told the Jamaica Observer in an exclusive interview, “This was what birthed the organisation, and the catalyst was Nigeria not winning any medals at the 2012 Olympics in London, it got me thinking.

“At the time, I was working for a consulting company in South Africa and they sent me on a project to Nigeria, to Lagos, and when I got to Lagos, Nigeria is about to have its National Sports Festival — which is like the Olympics in Nigeria, the national Olympics — and I decided to make a documentary because, at the time, I realised that Nigerians had won medals at the Olympics, mostly in the sprints, mostly in the relays.

“So the big question was, ‘Why not any more? Why not in 2012?’, and I decided that the documentary was going to be the most impactful and effective way of showing Nigerians that we have this great talent in athletics, and we’re not making use of it.”

Track and field is the second most popular sport in the country of over 200 million people.

“Track and field is a big thing in Nigeria,” Akani said. “I would say it’s our number two sport, but it’s a distant number two because football is like religion in Nigeria. Yes the Super Eagles [national team], that’s all anybody cares about but I, hopefully, have a little surprise for Nigerians because I know that any nation, any people, they support what they are good at, they support what they’re winning at. So if we start winning in athletics we’re going to have a lot of converts from football to athletics.”

High schools sports are not as popular in Nigeria, however, and that is the biggest obstacle faced by Akani and his crew.

“Secondary school athletics in Nigeria is almost dead,” Akani said rather bluntly. “Or you could say it was dead already before we breathed life into it with MTN Champs.

“We have federations for each sport, so we have the Athletics Federation of Nigeria, then we have federations for school sports. We have Nigeria University Games Association. We have the Nigeria School Sports Federation, which governs all of school sports in Nigeria, both secondary and primary schools. So there is a strata. There are definite strata that brings everybody into a fold, yes, but I think the structures in place have not been working.”

Akani says there has been an attempt to organise sports for the juniors and the National Youth Games — a competition for athletes under the age of 15 years old across all sports is held, however while it is being run by the Ministry of Sports, there are no links to the schools.

Akani said to complicate matters even more, those who participate in the National Youth Games don’t even need to be in school.

“There’s no guarantee that they are actually in school or that they are actually the right age that they say they are,” he said.

Champs 2013 opened his eyes to something new and wonderful.

“I had never seen or experienced anything like this before, thousands of kids coming together,” he said. “The operation fascinated me, fascinated my team. We were just there to shoot part of our documentary but I left with the conviction that, ‘You know what, even if no one else is going to do this in Nigeria, no one else has seen this in Nigeria so maybe I have to be the one to do it if I want to see it happen in my lifetime in Nigeria.’ ”