AfroBasket, Rena Wakama and D’Tigress

Nigeria has now won the AfroBasket overall seven times – 2003, 2005, 2017, 2019, 2021, 2023, and now 2025. It was not an easy run. They had to beat first-timers South Sudan to get to the semi-finals. Then they trounced Senegal 75 -68 to get to the finals. The finals against Mali was particularly tough. The Malians were looking for their very first trophy since the beginning of the tournament in 1966. They fought very hard. It was Nigeria’s toughest match of the tournament. By the end of the second quarter, the match was 41 – 41. The Nigerian team and their manager, Rena Wakama had to regroup and head to the locker room. When they returned, omo, the game changed. The matter reached another level. The Nigerian female Tigers put on display their talent for dominance and their ability as queens of the jungle. Professor Wole Soyinka once pronounced that “a tiger does not proclaim its tigritude, it pounces.” 

Rena Wakama’s girls pounced. Amy Okonkwo, Ezinne Kalu and Victoria Macaulay took over the pitch. Okonkwo scored 19 points, Kalu 20 points and Macaulay was absolutely brilliant with assists. Sika Kone, Mali’s brilliant star, tried all she could but the Tigers from Nigeria were indomitable. They had the experience, the pace and the determination. In the end, they won – the first team to win five Women’s AfroBasket titles in a row!  Amy Okonkwo, Nigeria’s captain was declared the Most Valuable Player of the Tournament. All Nigerians must be proud of these young ladies and their head coach. Fine girl, looking pretty, Rena Wakama, the 33-year-old from Okrika, is the first Nigerian National Female Basketball Coach since the tournament began. In 2024, she took the same team to the Quarter-finals of Basketball at the Olympics after beating Canada 79-70. She was recognised by the Olympics as the best coach of the tournament. Now, she has done it again with her team, winning the AfroBasket trophy back-to-back. She and her team deserve praise and appreciation.

 D’Tigress, Nigeria’s female basketball champions have brought us this honour at a time, and indeed the same weekend when another Nigerian daughter, Kemi Badenoch was busy condemning and de-marketing Nigeria on the international stage. Kemi Adegoke Badenoch says she is ashamed of Nigeria and the Nigerian passport and that she does not identify with us. To give us a bad name, she said in a podcast that Nigerian secondary school students of her time carried machetes to cut grass, because there were no lawn mowers. That of course is a lie. No Nigerian student goes about with a machete. In my time, we cut school lawns with cutlasses, and this assignment was seen as part of our upbringing process, to instill discipline. Kemi also claims that she fetched water in buckets. The Adegoke family must be ashamed of this their daughter who is now pointing out the direction to her father’s house with the left hand. They must be embarrassed. 

She wants to be British Prime Minister, fine, we wish her luck, but she must stop de-marketing Nigeria with misleading and diplomatically damaging comments.  A Nigerian peace-building organization, the Foundation for Peace Professionals (PeacePro) has already sent a formal petition to the UK Parliament to report Rt. Hon. Kemi Badenoch, Leader of the Opposition, and to demand an apology from her. Nobody needs her apology. She has declared that England is her home. Let her live and die there. In Nigeria, we are over 200 million, we are not looking for any odd person to join us. But Badenoch must do us a favour. She must renounce her Nigerian citizenship and follow due process in doing so. The 1999 Constitution of Nigeria, Sections 25 – 27 thereof, recognises her as a Nigerian citizen, Nigeria accepting dual nationality, irrespective of what she says. But she has the right under the same Constitution (Section 29) to formally part ways with Nigeria, and hold on to her acquired British citizenship. I can affirm that nobody will miss her. 

We are consoled by the fact that this same country has produced other daughters who are not prodigal like Kemi Badenoch who is struggling to wear a white mask, spitting on her heritage and ancestry, to please white folks. She is even more racist than anyone else that the label fits, except that when the mask is lifted, what is found is just sheer hypocrisy, opportunism, and a confused identity syndrome that may require the attention of a shrink. This is why Nigeria must be grateful to the footballing Super Falcons, and the basket-ball playing D’Tigress teams. Both teams have on their lists ladies like Kemi Badenoch who have links with other countries; identity, residence or professional, who have nonetheless chosen to identify with Nigeria and they are glad to do so. They are not running down Nigeria, rather they are contributing to its development, and are proudly Nigerian. These patriots have now been deservedly rewarded by the Nigerian government. President Tinubu was quite generous to the Super Falcons and their technical crew: Naira cash equivalent of $100, 000 for the 24 players and the head coach (upgraded in his own case from $50, 000 to $100, 000), $50,000 for 10 members of the technical and the conferment of the National Honour of the Order of the Niger (OON) on both the players and the technical crem members. Members of the triumphant, record-making D’Tigress team and their technical crew have been so honoured too. The only difference is that they were received by the Vice President Kashim Shettima on behalf of the President.  

It is clear to those who may doubt the fact that sports achievement brings national pride and honour. The psychological effect of sports victory is far-reaching. Nigerian Presidents love every success in the sports arena. It is a low-hanging fruit arena for every administration. I am not supposed to report everything I saw during my tenure as President Goodluck Jonathan’s official spokesperson, but the temptation to report the following is merely to underscore why sports victory is important. One morning, President Goodluck Jonathan had made up his mind to sack Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, who was then Minister of Sports. He had put me on standby that early morning to put out the news. The Attorney General and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Bello Adoke had also been summoned very early in the morning to let him know what would happen. This was in 2013, at the height of the rebellion of some Governors and Senators, including Senator Bukola Saraki who said they were going to form a breakaway faction of the People’s Democratic Party, the new PDP they called it. Mallam Abdullahi was Senator Saraki’s nominee in the Cabinet, He was meant to be sacrificed, to send a message to his principal and sponsor. 

 When we got to the Council Chamber however, the matter got twisted. It turned out that as part of Matters Arising or AOB, the Minister of Sports had chosen that very day to bring the FIFA U-17 World Cup, which Nigeria had just won, to Council and present it to the President. The Cup was brought into the Council Chambers. As Bolaji Abdullahi rose to his feet, Adoke who sat directly in front of me, a short distance to the President, turned back and whispered to me. He asked me to quickly go to Oga and tell him that the original plan would not work today. It would be wrong to sack a man the same day he was bringing joy to the country. I stood up and went to the President. Bolaji Abdullahi was going on, giving a speech about how the boys did well, and the government was so kind and so on and so forth. If only he knew. Characteristically, President Jonathan betrayed no emotion. His usual style was to reserve the sacking of any Minister till the end of the meeting and quietly announce that a certain Minister would no longer be at the Federal Executive meeting from the following week. Bolaji Abdullahi survived. He remained in the cabinet much longer, saved by sports victory. 

 I talk too much. But I have brought this up to show that every President naturally appreciates honour, glory and achievement especially when the citizens do well locally and internationally. President Tinubu must be a happy man at the moment. Nigerian daughters are doing well in football and basketball. Even in academics. A 15-year-old student of Academic Planet School, Aba is on her way to Virginia Tech University in the United States for a three-month summer course having won a spot in a STEM competition for 250, 000 girls from all over the world. She is from Aba. She is Nigerian. Her name is Grace John Nkpa. 

 The success of the Super Falcons and the D’Tigress must be a wake-up call for the Nigerian government at all levels to invest more in the growth, training and development of the girl-child, and even further, the empowerment of Nigerian women. For a fact, Nigerian women constitute half of the Nigerian population. They are the mothers, the wives, the grandmothers, the girlfriends, the aunties, the mothers-in-law who hold the threads of our livelihoods together. In public life, many of them have proved their mettle as persons who can make as much, if not better contributions to the making and the re-making of Nigeria. The likes of Kemi Badenoch are in the minority. In the majority, you would find the likes of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the Director-General of the World Trade Organisation (WTO). At the lower level, it is not a special revelation to note that in most secondary schools, the girls, where they are given the benefit of access to education, are more academically sound than the boys. On prize-giving day, the girls win most of the prizes these days. 

 We seem to be grooming a younger generation of boys who think that it is part of the privilege of being male in a family to spend half of the day in front of a tablet, playing games, chatting with friends on phone, or watching the Premier League or La Liga. One of my sons was so much into football, you could ask him who were the best No. 10 players in the world and he would start telling you their names, dates of birth, the clubs that they played for and their personal histories. Ask him about Shakespeare. He would be tongue-tied! I used to panic. Our daughters do not give us that much anxiety. Nigerian women have proven one thing: they are very consistent and they achieve. Perhaps if we were to allow women a much wider space in Nigerian politics and leadership, they will be much better in places where the men, who think that they are entitled to lead, have failed. 

 There is however, a sore point. While there are many persons who agree that President Tinubu is right to be as generous to D’Tigress female basketball team as he was to the Super Falcons, there are others who think that this idea of throwing bundles of cash around would serve no purpose. We can debate that, but let the female basketballers enjoy their own Presidential handshake, reception, cash and national titles too. That done, we can now begin the debate about the proper way to appreciate those who project the country positively. The Lionesses of England and their coach, Sarina Weigman won the Euro 2025 title the second time in a row. They were well received by an appreciative nation but nobody announced any cash donation. England is a different country. It is where Kemi Badenoch lives where a cutlass is described as a machete. But this is Nigeria. The best that can be said is that the Nigerian government may appreciate athletes, and provide an enabling environment for the development of sports but it must also encourage and reward the flowering of talents in other areas of human endeavour beyond sports where many young Nigerians are equally excelling. Nurses and doctors should be paid.  Academics too. Everyone must be made happy fairly and justly. Congratulations D’Tigress. Your nation salutes you!