The 18th National Sports Festival tagged Eko 2012, the Local Organising Committee (LOC) is organising a one-day seminar that will have international sports administrators.
Chief Executive Officer of the 2012 South Africa FIFA World CupDirector, Danny Jordaan as well as Director of the Department of International Cooperation and Development, International Olympic Committee (IOC), Ganda Sithole, will be among the speakers expected to deliver papers at the event scheduled to hold this Thursday November 22 at Muson Centre at Onikan, Lagos.
Also, a lecturer from the University of Kent, United Kingdom (UK), Dr. Sakis Pappous will also be among the speakers while the special guest of honour is the Minister of Sports/ Chairman, National Sports Commission (NSC), Bolaji Abdullahi, the chief host if Governor Babatunde Fashola of Lagos.
According to the LOC Secretary General, Kweku Tandoh, the essence of the seminar was to raise the profile of sports in Nigeria through mutual understanding and collaboration. “The seminar is an international sports gathering, which will discuss how to raise the profile of sports in Nigeria through mutual understanding and collaboration and looks at sports within the context of social development and economics. What we are trying to achieve with the seminar is to use the opportunity of the number of people and sports administrators that would be in Lagos during the festival to brain storm on the very important aspect of hosting a sporting event that we believe should be brought into the limelight in Nigeria. What are the legacies of hosting sporting events for the hosting cities? In most countries, you find out those cities that host events have legacies, but in Nigeria, a month or two after the event, you find out that there is hardly any impression that has been created in the minds or pockets of the people of the states that hosted that festival. So we want to look at the benefits and legacies of hosting a sporting event. The linkages between sports and tourism, sports and business, sports and science, so that at the end of the day, we can come up with solutions that will create an ongoing structural readjustment in sports and that is why we are bringing these international sports administrators,” the LOC scribe said.