I AM writing this on Saturday morning, 26 October, 2024 immediately after my early Muslim prayers. I have just checked the timing for the El Clasico later in the day and it is reading 8.00pm Nigeria time. I was in the Santiago Bernabue when Real Madrid beat Barcelona 2-0 in the same fixture in March 2020. It was a spectacle.
But it’s not the El Clasico on my mind as I write this. It’s my involvement with the investigative panel set up by the most recent Minister of Sports Development, Senator John Owan Enoh, that is on my mind. At the time of writing, Enoh was the “outgoing sports minister.” Probably by the time this is published, his transition to another Ministry might be complete and he would be the “former sports minister.”
I decided to publish my account of stewardship in the “Alao Panel”, as some of my colleagues in the media have dubbed the Paris 2024 investigative committee, for the primary purpose of accountability. Ordinarily, what Nigerians should be reading now is the report of our committee, but events of the past few days have put the publication of the report on hold.
Following our inauguration on 25 September, 2024, we have worked nearly every day, interviewing people at home and abroad that could provide answers to our seven-point terms of reference on events at the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games. We presented our report to Enoh in his office on Tuesday, 22 October, 2024 and he told us to get ready for our presentation to the Nigerian public on Friday, 25 October. On Wednesday, 23 October, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu announced a federal cabinet shuffle that scrapped the Ministry of Sports Development and transferred Enoh to the Ministry of Trade and Investment. By the time my committee arrived back in his office on Friday, 25 October, the Ministry of Sports Development did not exist anymore!
That Friday morning, I had prepared a 3-page summary of our committee’s 54-page report that I planned to read to the media as the chairman of the panel. I titled it “Highlights of the Committee’s Resolutions and Recommendations” and I had an electronic copy in my phone ready for circulation to the media via Whatsapp messaging. But, there were no journalists to be seen at the presumed venue of our presentation. The moment President Tinubu announced his cabinet shuffle, Enoh had put everything on hold.