Rugby players plead NOC to admonish Sports Minister on federation boards

Some members of the country’s national rugby team on Friday urged the Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC) to intervene and ensure the reinstatement of their recently-dissolved national sports federation board.

The players, while speaking with newsmen in Lagos, said the board’s reinstatement would prevent Nigeria from incurring the wrath of the sport’s world body.

Onoruoyiza Jatto, the national men’s team captain who led players to the NOC office in Lagos on Thursday, urged the Youth and Sports Development Minister, Sunday Dare, to have a re-think.

Jatto told Newsmen that if the Sports Minister insisted on going ahead with the decision, Nigeria might be suspended for two years by the world governing body.

“Currently we are at the camp training for the World Cup qualifiers coming up in June, and this is being sponsored by the Africa Rugby Union.

“With the decision by the Minister to dissolve all sports federations’ boards, we are at the risk of being suspended by the world governing body and the Africa Rugby Union.

“We faced this same situation in 2009, 2015 and 2018 and we ended up being suspended for some years and on each occasion we lost our credibility in the midst of others.

“If this situation should happen again in Nigeria, the rugby sport will basically die and we will, like in the past, lose a lot of generations of players who are passionate about the sport,” Jatto said.

Also, a former captain of the national team, Azeez Ladipo, described Dare’s act of dissolving boards of 31 national sports federations as “unfortunate”.

He recalled that a similar situation was experienced in 2009 and Nigeria was banned by the world body then.

“In the process, great players who would have done the country proud were lost. Certainly, it is not a good thing to experience again.”

Ladipo said the need to avert that ugly situation led the players into gathering at the NOC office to appeal to it to wade into the matter before Nigeria is banned