Photo credit: Vanity Fair
Those who happened to have, unfortunately, lost their parents early in life would have been forced to realise that life, rather than be a bed of sweet smelling roses was rather one filled with werepe, prickly thorns.
Except they were so fortunate to have loving relatives, that is those relatives that would not be in the devilish practice of using the unlucky orphans to pamper their own already spoilt children.
Mr Barrack Obama used to be a lawyer in the USA. He later moved on to the Senate. He eventually became the forty fourth President of the world’s greatest democracy.
When Mr Obama was growing up, he had to live with the reality of an absentee father. He, more or less, had to live his own life. He smiled when he made some successes and he frowned when he recorded some failures, all alone.
However, when he became the American president, Kenya and Kenyans did not fail to see him as a home boy do good!
A similar case is that of Mr Anthony Oluwafemi Olaseni Joshua, MBE. He is not just the heavyweight champion but he is the unified heavyweight champion of the world because he is currently holding the titles of the WBA, IBF and IBO.
He is a British citizen of Nigerian parentage. He actually lived in Nigeria for sometime. However, when he came from England to see if he could represent Nigeria in the Olympics. He did not qualify.
However, his disqualification is not a problem to me. But I think if the sports training system was good, the system ought to have been monitoring those who did not qualify for the Olympics.
A mini Olympics could be organised for them. They could have even been given some emoluments. But the haphazard system in which we do things in this country would not have allowed us. He later went back to England and became, in the words of Psalm 118:22, ‘The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. ‘
It was therefore a surprise to me when top officials of the federal and Ogun state governments travelled to the UK to be at the ringside during the fight of Joshua and the Frenchman, Carlos Takam.
In the first instance, Mr Joshua is British. The law says so. The passport he is holding says so. The system that he used to become a champion says so. So, in spite of his feeling Nigerian, he remains a British.
By the way, let us assume Joshua is to fight a person representing Nigeria, whom will our officials support?
What our government officials should rather busy themselves doing is putting their acts right so that we might not lose budding stars again. If well organised, sports could earn our recessed economy some mega bucks.
Truly, success has many fathers while failure is an unfortunate orphan!
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