Nigeria will host the 13th edition of the ECOWAS African Wrestling Tournament billed to hold between March 4th and 10th, 2025. This follows an assurance to this effect by National Sports Commission Chairman Mallam Shehu Dikko.
Dikko was playing host to Director of Youth and Sports Development, ECOWAS, Francis Njoaguani on Tuesday. Njoaguani came to ascertain the country’s preparedness to host the event which will hold two months to ECOWAS’ 50th anniversary.
His words, “I want to assure you that we are committed. We will do everything possible to host the tournament. And we don’t want it to be just a one-off. We want to do more of these tournaments.”
In Dikko’s view, hosting the event will be in tandem with the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu commitment to ECOWAS and sports in general.
“Few days ago I heard that our visionary President has met up with all Nigeria’s outstanding obligations to Ecowas. It’s quite quite a huge amount of money and shows the commitment of Mr. President to make sure that we always meet our obligations as a people. This also goes into the area of sports. There’s quite a lot to do in sports so we are ready to collaborate with Ecowas to advance sport development projects of Ecowas”, he said.
He beckoned on ECOWAS to bring more sporting events to Nigeria.
“Mr. President is committed to having first class facilities in the country starting with the Abuja Stadium. We want to fix our stadium to make it available to host all sorts of tournaments. We are open to hosting daily events in this stadium. So you can bring, not just the traditional wrestling, but bring other sports that we can make our facilities available.
“The more events we can host, the more we are able to activate the sports economy we are trying to advanced because anytime you host an event you create a value chain of activities, market activists, sustained jobs, wealth distribution and all of that. We are ready to partner with ECOWAS to bring critical events to Nigeria, not just in Abuja, any State in Nigeria at all that is capable of hosting your events”, he added.
He opined that such events would help to keep the youths positively engaged and deal with restiveness in the entire ECOWAS subregion.
He continued, “All the issues we have around security in ECOWAS, we can use sports as a foundation and pathway to see how we can get that mellowed down. So that our youths can have their energies redirected into doing the right things.”
In his reckoning, the event, which Nigeria had never hosted before, holds more attractions.
“This will be during the 50th anniversary of ECOWAS and our dear President is chairman of ECOWAS, so it will be befitting. May be while the tournament is going on, there could be a meeting of ECOWAS here. So we might likely even push the head of states to grace the final. That will upscale our sports to another level”, he concluded.
Njoaguani seized the opportunity to intimate the chairman on the 3rd edition of the ECOWAS Abuja International Marathon also slated for March 2025, which the chairman also committed to collaborate to ensure its success and more value addition to the economy.
