Afuze and Nigeria’s culture of abandonment

It has often been said that maintenance culture is not one of Nigeria’s virtues. And we totally agree. Ours is a country where the culture of abandonment is celebrated; where a government spends huge amount of public funds to erect projects, rolls out the drums to commission these projects, puts the projects to use for a while, then abandons them, for whatever reasons, and moves on pretending that these structures never existed.

Nothing demonstrates this anomaly better than the Afuze Olympic Games Village in Owan East Local Government Area of Edo State. Built in 1974 by the then military governor of Midwestern State, Brigadier-General Samuel Ogbemudia, and opened by General Yakubu Gowon, the games village sits on a surveyed land measuring 146,998 hectares, along with the Afuze College of Physical and Health Education. It had small housing units and was originally meant to harbour, train and prepare the state’s athletes for the National Sports Festival that began in 1973. The athletes were meant to train with the top-class facilities in the College of Physical and Health Education. In the late 1980s, however, the Federal Government was said to have taken over the place to train national athletes ahead of global competitions.

Today, sadly, this monument, which has been abandoned for many decades, has become a ghost village harbouring mostly reptiles and rodents. The only “saving grace” seems to be the fact that the locals, in order to keep the place going, repaired some of the decrepit buildings and converted them into low-cost residential apartments.

Just recently, a national newspaper published an elaborate report on the games village with a damning verdict: “The world-class boxing gym, which once had a roof suspended by strong wooden pillars, was now non-existent. What was left was a gym overgrown with weeds with the pillars burnt, an act perpetrated by hunters in search of animals. Other facilities like the handball pitch, basketball court, volleyball court, tennis courts, hockey and cricket pitches, located inside the Michael Imoudu College of Physical Education, were also decaying. The multi-purpose Conference Hall of the games village has partly been overgrown by grass. A stale stench of excreta, which is littered everywhere inside the building, greets you as you enter the building. The ceilings have fallen off with all the windows vandalised… The Human Performance Laboratory, which used to offer a variety of fitness services such as personal training, massage therapy, fitness testing and evaluations of athletes, is now non-existent. The HPL helped coaches identify the fitness needs of their athletes and provided them with an individualised exercise prescription.”

Sad as it is, the games village is just a small scene in a voluminous tale of government neglect. Numerous abandoned multi-million naira Federal Government properties litter the entire Nigerian landscape, with most of them posing security threats as they have been taken over by various descriptions of hoodlums and miscreants. In Lagos alone, we can count the 45,000-capacity National Stadium in Surulere, the old Federal Secretariat at Ikoyi, the Nigerian External Telecommunications (NET) building on Marina, the Independence Building on old Defence Street, the Tafawa Balewa Square, the Mosaic House on Tinubu Street, among several others, to say nothing about the ones in other states that have been illegally converted to other uses.

We do not wish to cry over spilt milk. That these are lean times for Nigeria is no longer news. For us, therefore, it is a good time for the country’s rulers to learn one or two lessons about how not to waste scarce public funds. We urge the current Federal Government to urgently undertake an inventory of all its abandoned properties across the nation and decide whether to sell them outright or concession them to the private sector. These structures must be rescued without delay. For a country that is already encumbered by seemingly intractable infrastructure deficit, abandoning the few it was able to develop in times of plenty to rot can hardly be said to make any economic sense.