Another international championship. Another disaster.
Once again, Nigeria will not be participating in a major athletics event — not because our athletes aren’t fast enough and couldn’t qualify, but because the people charged with taking them there simply couldn’t get the job done.
The latest embarrassment is Nigeria’s no-show at the 2025 World Relays in Guangzhou, China, scheduled for May 10–11. A 17-person team was named, including world record holder Tobi Amusan, Favour Ofili, Udodi Onwuzurike, and Favour Ashe, ready to compete in the men’s and women’s 4x100m, mixed 4x100m, and mixed 4x400m events. But they didn’t travel due to visa issues. Again!
This wasn’t just another relay meet. The World Relays serves as qualifying event for the 2025 World Athletics Championships. Missing it isn’t just a missed race — it’s a massive missed opportunity that could affect our relay teams’ chances of competing on the world stage next year. One will quickly remember how then sports minister Sunday Dare-backed Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) executives opted to take Nigeria athletes to the USA for a training tour rather that the World Relays in Silesia, Poland in 2021, which affected our chances of qualifying for the relay events at the 2020 Tokyo Olympics.
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In a desperate attempt to shift blame, a statement reportedly from the National Sports Commission emerged, claiming that all due processes were followed — that the AFN applied early, the NSC approved funds in good time, and the Chinese authorities, allegedly due to geopolitical tensions, denied visas to Nigeria’s U.S.-based athletes. It even suggested that World Athletics and the host nation failed in their responsibility to ensure visa facilitation, and that a petition had been sent to demand Nigeria be allowed to qualify through alternative means.
But these excuses simply do not hold up.
If World Athletics truly failed in facilitating visas, why are athletes from countries like the United States, Jamaica, Spain and Botswana already in China, preparing for the same event? Nigerian athletes based in the U.S. are not the only ones who had to go through visa processes under the same diplomatic climate. Yet, those other countries managed to get their athletes there — because they planned and acted with competence. Nigeria, once again, did not.
And this is not new with the Okowa-led AFN. Just a few months ago, the World Athletics Indoor Championships in Nanjing, China, witnessed a similar visa fiasco. Out of 10 Nigerian athletes scheduled to compete, only one — Chukwuebuka Enekwechi — made it, finishing fifth in the men’s shot put. The rest? Grounded by poor planning and even poorer logistics. The federation couldn’t even secure entry for its own athletes.
Since Tonobok Okowa emerged as president of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) in a controversial election on June 14, 2021 — one supervised by then Sports Minister Sunday Dare — Nigeria’s participation at global events has been defined more by chaos than competition.
At the Tokyo Olympics just weeks after Okowa took office, 10 Nigerian athletes were disqualified from competing because they failed to meet anti-doping compliance protocols. It was a global embarrassment that left Nigeria with the worst record of any country in that regard.
In 2024, ahead of the African Athletics Championships in Douala, Cameroon, the travel arrangements for the Nigerian team were equally shambolic. Athletes, including world record holder Tobi Amusan, were driven by road from Benin City — venue of the national trials — to Cotonou, Benin Republic, before flying out to Cameroon. It was a journey that should have been better planned and executed for elite-level athletes.
And then there’s Favour Ofili — a prime example of how poorly the federation treats its athletes. At the Paris 2024 Olympics, despite qualifying for the women’s 100m, Ofili was inexplicably dropped from the event. No clear explanation was given. The decision raised serious questions about the competence and fairness of the selection process. Ofili’s omission wasn’t just a missed chance — it was a glaring failure that cost Nigeria a potential medal and undermined the morale of one of its brightest young stars.
In response to these failures, what does the Okowa-led AFN point to as progress? Scholarships. That Nigerian athletes are gaining admission to U.S. colleges is being paraded as a federation success story. But helping athletes find college placements abroad should not be the primary metric of success for a national sports federation. That’s the work of private coaches, scouts, and families. The AFN’s responsibility is to build a strong domestic system that produces and supports elite athletes — with or without a foreign scholarship.
We should not have to export talent to see it thrive. Nigeria is rich with athletic potential. What we lack is a leadership capable of harnessing it.
The job of the AFN is to create a functioning ecosystem: national meets that run on time, camps that are well-planned, travel logistics that don’t derail preparation, and structures that let athletes focus on performance — not paperwork. Instead, we have a federation that can’t even secure visas — and officials who now want to pin their own ineptitude on international politics.
With AFN elections set for later this month, stakeholders and delegates must reflect on the record of the last four years. Okowa’s tenure has delivered avoidable disqualifications, chaotic travel, logistical blunders, athlete neglect, and repeated administrative failures. No amount of PR or side distractions can mask that reality.
Missed opportunities have real consequences. For many athletes, a missed championship is a missed season. For some, it’s the end of a dream.
Nigeria deserves better. Our athletes deserve leadership that matches their sacrifice with competence and accountability.
We’ve missed enough races. We can’t afford to keep missing the point.
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