The official presentation of National Sport Festival “EDO 2020” Unity Torch to Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu at Lagos House, Ikeja, on Thursday, March 12, 2020.
The Sports Festival
The National Sports Festival will hold from March 22 to April 1. Recently, the Edo State Government took a group of senior sports editors around the facilities being prepared for the festival and also outlined plans to make the festival an economic booster to the state. Led by the state’s Deputy Governor, Comrade Phillip Shaibu, who is also chairman of the Local Organising Committee (LOC), the editors were educated on the plans to make Edo State the hub of sports in Nigeria and leader in the economic exploitation of the country’s abundant human resources.
The National Sports Festival features as much as 11,500 athletes and officials, who are expected in camp and looked after by the host state. And Shaibu assured that Edo State is ready to meet the demands of the games.
“For accommodation,” he said, “we are looking at about 11,500 athletes and officials and what we have done is to go into partnership with the University of Benin and Federal Government Girls College, Benin. And we’ve got accommodation in these places. We are helping the University of Benin, Ugbowo and Ekewan campuses, to renovate all their hostels; we are also doing the same at the Federal Government Girls College… We are furnishing them with beddings to accommodate these athletes. And don’t forget that at the University of Benin, beyond the accommodation, we are also going to help them to fix some of their sporting facilities.
“It is a whole partnership with them and we are going to have about 17 centres where the sports events will take place. As we have always said, we want to redefine how these games are being hosted, so that at the end of the day, Edo will be a reference point. For us, Edo is the home of sports.”
On the security and traffic management during the games, the deputy governor boasted that Edo has one of the best traffic management teams in Nigeria, adding that Benin City has the best road network in Nigeria.
“And what we have simply done, in line with our infrastructural revolution, is to tar a lot of these roads,” he stated, “map out all the areas of interest, such as areas of accommodation, event areas, among others.
“All these areas have been mapped out and we have a competition guide for all athletes and visitors that would become. And I can tell you that Edo has a good record in terms of running a transportation business. If there is any government that runs transportation very well, it is Edo State.”
Shaibu revealed that the games’ Transport Committee is headed by the chairman of the Edo City Transport Service, adding that the traffic management team and the security team are working as a team to deal with the issues of movement, security and accommodation, and all other logistics.
According to him, “We are actually ready and we have also done something different with the renovation of Samuel Ogbemudia Stadium. We will be hosting lots of international games there. We have the police, military, State Security Service and we have our own security personnel. We have 1,225 officers that will combine with the security agencies to deal with the issues of security at the accommodation zone, street zone, and the event areas.
“We recently purchased some vehicles for Wabazighan Security outfit to be stationed at strategic areas across the state. We are not only dealing with security for our visitors, but we are also aware that our Edo indigenes might be inconvenienced during this period. So, we have also mapped out strategies to deal with the issue of their inconvenience, because we will be telling them which roads to use and which ones not to use… which means we have to provide security on those alternative routes that we provided for them.”
