It was India’s first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, that said: “Evil unchecked grows, evil tolerated poisons the whole system.” This timeless truism illustrates how age cheating in sports, tolerated years ago, has become a behemoth that is causing Nigerian sporting attainments to pale into insignificance, while the practitioners end up having a less than honourable sunset for their careers. What was seen as an African scourge in times past has spread to Asia, Europe and North America, among other nations. ENO-ABASI SUNDAY writes on efforts made by the Nigeria Academicals Sports Committee (NASCOM) to revive academicals in the country and how the absence of an authentic data bank, the connivance of cheating parents and sports administrators and the use of non-students in age-group international competitions constitute the greatest factors that retard sports development in the country.

ONE of the most bizarre and shocking cases of age fraud in world sports was uncovered a few years ago in South Africa, when a local journalist, Thomas Kwenaite, unearthed a handful of “age-cheats,” who represented the country in an U-16 tournament in France.

Making it more scandalous was the fact that the captain of the side, it later emerged, was a 24-year old university student from Port Elizabeth. In a bid to force the belief that his son was within the needed age-limit hence eminently qualified to represent South Africa at the cadet championship, the captain’s father dragged Kwenaite to the South African press Ombudsman, charging him for slandering his ward.

But the shamed dad was forced to swallow his vomit and withdraw the complaint after documents obtained from schools indicated that the captain would have started school at the tender age of two. But the revelation did not stop hordes of people branding Kwenaite as being “unpatriotic.”
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