National Sports Commission chairman Mallam Shehu Dikko
held a strategic meeting with Minister of Youth Development Ayodele Olawande on
Friday.
According to Olawande the meeting was "to discuss
strategies to advance youth interest in the sport sector."
This partnership is apt considering the Commission's
resolve to create value chains around the industry to harness and drive the
sports economy in Nigeria. A move that would create jobs and take teeming
youths off the streets as well as provide a sustainable pathway to greatness
for youths to look up to.
Speaking in the wake of this meeting, Dikko said,
"Quite an engaging meeting with my brother and friend (Youth Development
minister). This is very much in line with what we are planning to do in the
Commission in line with Mr. President's mandate to us. We want the youths to be
properly engaged. The youth are majorly the ones doing sports in the first
place so we must create proper platform
and possibilities for them to live their passion. Youths are the ones with
a lot of energy to burn. If you don't deploy that energy effectively, they will
use it negatively."
Dikko believes that proper involvement of the youths
in sports will drastically reduce crime and deal with youth restiveness and
indeed provide hope to the youths.
His words, "A lot of these vices you see the
youths involved in is because of idleness. Get them meaningfully engaged and
they wouldn't do those things. When we were doing Friday night games in NPFL
some years back, the security personnel had statistics to show that whenever
those matches were played crime rate reduced drastically over the weekend. This
is what we are driving at."
He is optimistic that such meetings with the Youth
Development minister will aid the commission's course.
In line with NSC's plans to revive schools sports and
NUGA, the parties also engaged the Honourable Minister of Education via phone
during the meeting.
Dikko continued, "It is the vision of the
National Sports Commisisn to revive the School Sports and NUGA games (National University Games) through a proper
resetting, robust and sustainable programs. Engaging youths in sports should go
hand-in-hand with their education hence the need to have a proper synergy and
alignment between the NSC, Ministry of Youth Development and Ministry of
Education."
"We are widely engaging with those we need to
succeed in this assignment. This is one of the most crucial engagements because
the ministry caters for the core group we are going to be using. We have slated
further meetings and the final outcome will be very successful and
sustainable.", he concluded.
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