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Sports festival can still hold in 2020*
Published September 16, 2020



Minister of Youth and Sports Development, Sunday Dare, remains hopeful that the National Sports Festival will hold this year but noted that the ministry would be guided by the Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, Nigerian Centre for Disease Control and the health ministry.

The National Sports Festival earlier scheduled to hold in March was postponed due to the outbreak of COVID-19.

“It is our desire to have the National Sports Festival which I call the Nigeria Olympic Games to take place this year, we have shown commitment,” Dare said in Lagos on Tuesday.


“We already set up a team and through their reports, they already suggested October, based on the COVID-19 prevention rate, and other indices like COVID-19 protocols, we have been working with the PTF, NCDC, the health ministry.

“The ministry will be properly guided and when the numbers are right, we are going to have that festival and it is going to have both contact and non-contact sports.

“The world already started both contact and non-contact sports, there are protocols in place, if we repeat the same thing here, we are going to get our lives back also.”

He added that athletes would resume camping in three states in a fortnight.

The athletes will be camped in Akure, Abuja and Pankshin.

“In another two weeks, we hope to open camps in Akure, Abuja and Pankshin in Plateau State, to help our athletes get over the rustiness of the COVID-19 lockdown, it is going to be a two weeks event whereby all our athletes will be in different centres and we are going to pay for everything.”