The BBC is a doing a good job of embarrassing us – and we roundly deserve it

by Roqeebah Olaoniye

It’s really exhausting to continue being fixated on the “whys” and “hows” of where we currently find ourselves as regards the competitions. It’s exhausting we tell you, but when the BBC puts us on the spot, one has to wonder if, and why we deserve all the backlash we keep getting from the international press.

Everyone remembers how Nigerian athletes filed out in their tracksuits for the opening ceremonies – yes we did. The opening ceremonies at the Olympics is where every country tries to showcase their traditional attires. You know glamorous showing off and all. If you ask us, even if people had predicted that 13 days in, we’d still have no medals, no one would have predicted that we’d lose at showing off. We show off every weekend for goodness sake! How hard could this have been right?

Now we’re getting hit left, right, and centre…

The BBC spoke to two athletes who confirmed that they had only received their sports and ceremonial kits on Thursday.

“An unnamed Athletics Federation of Nigeria official told Nigeria’s Vanguard newspaper that he had never experienced anything like this in all his years in sport.

“Money meant for the Games was held tightly by [sport] ministry officials and they were just releasing money piecemeal,” the official is quoted as saying.

The government had budgeted 600m naira ($1.7m; £1.3m) for the Olympics, the Vanguard reported in July.

But payment problems appear to have dogged Nigerian Olympians.

Here’s how we got here:

A Nigerian designer named David Bowler had designed outfits for the team to wear at the opening ceremonies and the athletes had tested them out before President Muhammadu Buhari in July. Picture this; our men in the traditional South-south attire, complete with the hats and our ladies in long dresses with capes and wearing turbans. Super right? Yes.

This designer name David Bowler designed these outfits for free and all we had to do was contract it to him and finis! But no, we didn’t and we don’t know why. We didn’t question this at the appropriate time. We didn’t raise hell about it and here we are.

If we investigate properly, we are almost sure the major reason why team Nigeria at the Olympics have only just got their kit 13 days into the Games has something to do with a complacent tailor (or a group of them) and a contractor that has allowed his or her habit of returning to the same kind of tailor(s) affect a whole country.

It’s a reason to get publicly embarrassed. Take for example this question that bugs us ALL the time: ‘why do we constantly return to the same tailor that never gets our clothes done on time?’ You’ll go there, give a date when you need your clothes delivered, and EVERY single time it’s the same result. Your clothes are not ready in time!

We can spend all day listing out the creative reasons these evil tailors come up with – many of them are frankly laughable – but what is not funny is that the whole world clearly sees us for exactly what we are: a set of people who cannot even plan ahead for a competition organized four years apart. Shame.

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