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.
