By Ikeddy ISIGUZO

THE only thing wrong with Hope Uzodinma, Imo State Governor, holding a reception for seven members of the Super Falcons after the team's victory in Morocco was that Uzodinma was from the wrong side of Nigeria - a part that is marked out for vilification no matter what it does or how it does it.

Uzodinma did what other Governors do and are praised. His meeting with the Imo 7 exposed that those players rightly hailed as Nigerians throughout WAFCON 2024 were not so Nigerian.

Super Falcons' victory has been smeared by a mindless reward system that President Ahmed Tinubu pulled from nowhere. The players got $100,000, a house, national honour each exactly for doing what? When they win the Olympics or the World Cup, how would Nigeria reward them? Is this the benchmark for rewarding sports performance at the African level?

Nigerians are almost adding the team to their problems.

The rewards are seen as excessive against the background of the penury that the APC government has visited on Nigerians.

What lessons do the victory present? None. It has provided more opportunities for the ventilation of the same matters that have kept ruining sports - lack of depth, planning replaced by populism. The same team being showered with shocking rewards will soon be crying out for resources to play their World Cup and Olympic Games qualifiers.

Just like in 1980 when there were concerns that the winning team was not a "national team" - only one player from the North - hopefully Nigerians would not destroy the Super Falcons through similar sentiments.

Super Falcons could be finished by the mighty and powerful insisting on inclusion of their people in the team with expectations that they would benefit from the next round of rewards.

People have fixed their gazes on the rewards rather than the toils that led to them. I still maintain the rewards are over-board. The future should have been in the picture.

Uzodinma did not know he was exposing the fact that Imo State alone took seven spots in the national team.

Elsewhere, some of these resources would have been availed the National Institute for Sports to investigate if female football players' prowess benefits from their origins. We can still do that. It is not too late.

What happens to coach Justin Madugu who in victory out-smarted Jorge Vilda, Spain's winning coach at the 2023 FIFA Women's World Cup and coached Morocco at WAFCON? Apostles of a foreign coach are still in the wings making a case for one.

As celebrations continue, would this team be in any state to play football in the next couple of months. Fatigue and concentration aside, can they manage their fortune and football? Do we still have a team?

Governor of Adamawa State, Ahmadu Fintiri, has handed Madugu, a three-bedroom bungalow and N50 million for making the State proud.

While Super Falcons were making Nigeria proud, back home ethnic hatred filled the social media landscape, centred on the 2023 electoral contest between Peter Obi and Tinubu, an election that witnessed new lows in hate speech, ethnic profiling, and the Igbo being openly stopped from voting.

The exchanges were so charged that if Esther Okoronkwo had missed that decisive penalty in the final, she could have been accused of acting on behalf of Peter Obi who online hate merchants held responsible for Super Eagles losing the AFCON final in Abidjan. They claimed that Obi?s luckless presence caused the loss.

Obi's supporters were replying in equal measures in a week that other ethnic issues were on the front burner in Lagos and nationally.

Nigerians have never been more divided than under Tinubu who has taken nepotism, clannishness, and hatred for the Igbo to unimaginable heights.

He has large followers in this. There are no more pretences about it.

Loud proclamations, threats, and public policies against the Igbo have become great values and qualifications for appointments to high offices.

Where else will a Bayo Onanuga after threatening the Igbo during the 2023 elections and offered more threats when asked to apologise, be speaking for the President of Nigeria whose speeches are littered with calls for unity?

"I owe no one apology for ethnic slur against the Igbos ? they are threats to Yorubas,? Onanuga said in March 2023 while warning the Igbo to stop meddling in the politics of Lagos. Onanuga threatens the Igbo conveniently forgetting he is not from any part of Lagos.

The daily spewing of hatred on the social media is led by the same people who warn against Nigerians going the way of the 1994 ethnic cleansing in Rwanda which Onanuga told Nigerians about on a 2 September 2018 post?

Onanuga wrote, ?I visited the Genocide Memoriam in Kigali, Rwanda, and left deeply sober after 90 minutes of tour. I recommend it as a must-go place for ethnic champions, Pastors and Imams harbouring hatred about their fellow human beings and non-adherents of their faith. I hope they will take away as I did, that human beings do not in most cases have a choice about who they are in this world. Our ethnic identity is determined for us by our maker. So, why do we hate a person because he is not a member of our ethnic group? Why should a Christian hate a Muslim, vice versa? Let all humanity live in love?.

He stamped a picture of himself with the Genocide Memorial on the background as proof of the visit. Today, that post is evidence of Onanuga's hypocrisy and further proof that his present boss approves setting one group of Nigerians against the other.

What changed Onanuga between 2018 and 2023? Let me speculate that it could the change in his bosses.

During the 2018 visit to Rwanda, his boss was President Muhammadu Buhari who would never allow nobody to compete with him in dispensing hatred to the Igbo.

Buhari called us a dot. He singled out Igbo NYSC members from a group that paid him a courtesy visit in Daura to advise them on not "being like Nnamdi Kanu".

By 2018, Onanuga was in the second year of his appointment as Managing Director of the News Agency of Nigeria, NAN. He wanted to present an image of one who cared about which direction Nigeria went.

When his tenure was not renewed in 2022 he became more open with his ethnic tendencies. He used speaking for Tinubu to water the growth of ethnic champions to whom Rwanda, in Nigeria, means nothing.

These incidents are still on record. Nobody has been arrested. Emboldened, Onanuga warned the Igbo to keep off Lagos in 2027. He gets rewarded for his divisive utterances.

Suggestions have been made that Tinubu should make a national broadcast to lower the tension in Lagos. Would he heed the calls? Would he sacrifice a major plank of his strategy for the 2027 election for the peace of the nation?

Nigeria is in too much trouble in too many areas that the President should provide leadership in pulling the country back from the dangerous promotion of ethnic sentiments at a time Nigerians are too hungry and angry to celebrate a major sports dominance to the full.

Sports victories are not solutions to empty stomachs, insecurity, and a future that looks bleak and promises more darkness if it remains mismanaged.

?Isiguzo is a major commentator on minor issues.

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