When the Super Falcons, the Nigerian women’s national football team, won their tenth WAFCON title in Morocco recently, the President splashed them with a $100,000 prize, conferred the national honour of Officer of the Order of the Niger on all 24 players, and then gifted each of them a three-bedroom apartment. Staff of the team’s technical crew also received $50,000 each as part of the presidential recognition. Barely a week later, the women’s national basketball team, D’Tigress, also won their seventh AfroBasket title and fifth consecutive title in Côte d’Ivoire. In the spirit of the gift-giving season, they, too, were understandably given a similar set of rewards since anything less than what the footballers received would have sparked some ill feelings that basketball is a lesser sport.
Please let it be known that I do not grudge the players a kobo of their money. In a country where a shiftless potentate like Muhammadu Buhari incurred millions of dollars in medical bills throughout his public life without ever contributing to the nation’s glory, these outstanding sports women deserve what they get. The delight they have brought to Nigeria in the past weeks outpaces what the thousands of our good-for-nothing and obesely overpaid retinue of leaders achieve in one or two terms. Good for the women, and hopefully, the government makes good on the promises. We do not want a repeat of 1994, when the Super Eagles eventually received their promised apartments decades later.
That said, two things can be right—or wrong—at the same time. It is right for them to be well-rewarded for their efforts, and equally right to criticise the seemingly whimsical system of rewards for the players. If we can give so much for a continental championship, what will now be considered adequate compensation if it ever happens that the Nigerian team, male or female, wins the World Cup? Or have they foreclosed that possibility and resigned themselves to continental championships triumphs as the peak of Nigeria’s sporting glory? There are Olympic medals to be won in 2028. What will be considered fair for those to earn?
There are several problems here, and the first is that such monetary overcompensation is at the very heart of the Tinubus’ politics. Whether Mr or Mrs Tinubu or even son Seyi, the family offers cash in a way that suggests they are either atoning for how they made the money or are simply incapable of sustaining relationships not denominated through the cash gifts (or both). For instance, not too long ago, Mrs Tinubu embarked on her now moribund project of encouraging women to engage in backyard farming and announced the Every Home A Garden competition, where first-time women farmers would showcase their gardens to potentially win a N25m prize. She made the same monetary offer when she also launched her now-defunct national Aṣọ Ẹbí design competition. The cash prizes were disproportionate to the activity for which they were intended, making the money seem like the primary goal. Why attach such a humongous sum if not a lack of trust in your ability to inspire a national movement that would take a life of its own? If the contests had any bearing on the reality of the people for whom they were said to have been designed, they would have devolved towards it naturally rather than try to buy their interest. The Tinubu family knows nobody would love them without their money, and so they regularly bribe their way into the hearts of an impoverished populace.
Second is, of course, the reality of the Nigerian sporting environment. Elsewhere, medals come with multiple opportunities for product endorsements, coaching positions, and sometimes, speaking engagements, all of which could culminate in lucrative earnings for successful athletes. The country would not need to overcompensate you because it has a system that does so, and judiciously too. Michael Jordan, Roger Federer, and Serena Williams are among the athletes for whom sporting glory has been regenerative well beyond their active careers. Nigeria has no such benefits; its reward system is highly dependent on the mood of its incumbent president.
Former President Olusegun Obasanjo once attempted to inaugurate the tradition of celebrating sporting victories with a mere presidential handshake, but that effort also went nowhere. The whole idea was that bringing glory to the nation is a reward in itself and need not be devalued by turning it into a cash-and-carry commodity. But that was also a fundamental misreading of the nature of our society.
Symbolic rewards like a presidential handshake have no equity value in a country like ours, where economic opportunities are constricted. Nobody can eat a medal here, and shaking hands with the President does not necessarily open business doors. Even worse is that the person who wanted to get Nigeria started on that path himself lacked the necessary self-discipline to motivate anyone to look beyond pecuniary gains and embrace a higher patriotic ideal. So, we have remained at a level where athletes need to be overpaid for any reward to be remarkable.
The present timing is also rather auspicious. The President, who has been embarrassed by persistent policy failure, a general dysfunctionality under his watch, and a populace that screams “ebi ń pa wá ó!’ at his motorcade, suddenly gets the lucky chance to celebrate a sporting win. We cannot blame him for overdoing it. More than anyone, he needs to reassure himself he is not entirely jinxed; that Nigeria is still capable of achieving some victories under his leadership.
Then, of course, announcing a $100,000 prize for a single player is telling of the extent to which the naira has depreciated. Nigeria has faced severe inflationary trends, but the past two years have been particularly challenging. Naira has virtually no value anymore. The prices of goods and services have largely escaped control, and although the figures may seem meaningless, they still determine reality.
It has reached the point where you must be high up in the upper-middle class to afford a fairly decent used car. That reality is also expressed, not only in our regular transactions, but also in how we reward our athletes. Any amount you give them falls short, and so it must be upped to the extreme just for it to have some meaning.
Finally, a huge monetary award for sporting victory is the triumph of spectacle over substance. It is cheaper—and I mean that in every sense of the word—to reward a triumph that was engineered through other functional systems than to build a local one that supports a sporting ecosystem from the ground up. That is because you cannot develop sports in isolation; it must be achieved in consonance with a better infrastructure of education and health, urban facilities, public amenities, and an overall conducive atmosphere. You cannot be a country where public schools have gone comatose and your professors serially lament having to farm to survive and still prioritise sports investment. Lagos, the city purportedly built up by the present occupant of Aso Rock, submerges under the floodwaters that rage into homes from breached canals and long-decrepit underground sewage systems. You cannot be a society that wades through all that mess and still somehow manages sports effectively. You must outsource the responsibility. When you are fortunate to win against other similarly under-resourced teams on a poor continent, what else is there to do than to lavish them with the money you could not spend on building requisite structures?
