2012 Sports Festival: Lagos Targets Filled Venues

Lagos State is planning to ensure that when it hosts the 12th National Sports Festival next year, all venues for the tourney will be jam-packed with fans.

Commissioner for Sports, Wahid Enitan Osodi, said that Lagos wants to add glamorous dimensions to the sports festival whereby fans will be encouraged to troop out to watch sporting events in the tourney.

One of the strategies the state intend to use is the upgrading of the sporting facilities to attact fans to the venues of the competition.

Apart from this, the state wants to use the sports festival to showcase the cultural heritage of the ‘Centre of Excellence’ to the visitiors during the event.

Osodi said Governor Babatunde Raji Fashola-led government in Lagos plans to give attention to infrastructural development in the state in preparation for the sports festival.

“In the last two years, Lagos State had hosted major international competitions and all these have been successful. We had to commend Rivers State for putting up a good show at the last National Sports Festival, but for us, we are not going to focus solely on the sporting aspect of it. The event will afford us the opportunity to showcase the rich cultural heritage of the state, a friendly state where all indigenes across the nation reside,” he said.

“We want to stage a competition where the stadium will always be filled and that is why we are going to give most of our facilities a facelift for the competition,” he said.

On the preparation of the athletes for the championship, Osodi, a former chairman of the state’s Table Tennis Association, said all the sporting associations would be engaged to groom athletes for the festival, as the government frowns at poaching athletes or encourage elite athletes to prosecute National Sports Festival.

He said that other sports would be given attention alongside football.

“This year a lot more will be done for other sports in terms of coaching and organisation of tournaments.

” The result in the next sports festival to be hosted by Lagos will tell the story that the state is back on track as the sports destination of Nigeria and even Africa,” he said.

On school sports, he said that the sports ministry would work closely with education ministry to ensure that students are engaged in sports as well as focus on their studies.

“We’ll work closely with the Ministry of Education especially on schools sports development with the aim of involving over 1,000 schools in Lagos State. The collaboration will feature tournaments throughout the year with school work, sports and physical well–being of the pupils in perspective,” he said.

—Taiwo Adelu