Customs CG in a warm handshake with players before the football match final of tye Inter- Command Games in Ikeja, Lagos
By Godwin Oritse
The Police Unit of the Nigeria Customs Service (NCS) yesterday emerged winners of the football competition at the just-concluded Inter-Commands Games, as the Service’s leadership commenced plans to upgrade sports facilities across its various commands nationwide as part of efforts to promote and strengthen sports development within the Service.
Speaking at the finals of the match held at the Customs Training College in Ikeja, Lagos, the Comptroller-General of Customs, Adewale Adeniyi, said the training command’s sports facilities should be improved from their present state. He pledged that the Service would rise to the challenge by upgrading and modernising the facilities to provide a better environment for sporting activities and talent development.
Adeniyi also said the facilities needed to be upgraded ahead of the resumption of newly recruited officers, stressing that improved sporting infrastructure would help the Service identify and harness more talents.
“And I want to take this as a challenge. We are trying to build a new facility elsewhere, outside of this place.
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”This is why perhaps it might not be very wise for us to concentrate those kind of resources here. But I want to assure all of us that a very, very fitting sports facility would be part of the new location of our Training College in the very home state. We might start something here, which might just be something temporary, to ensure that our new set of recruits that will be coming here will have a place to express their talent.
“When we came into office, we all were unanimous about the fact that we made three things the pillars of our programme, consolidation, collaboration, and innovation. And I think I’ve seen those three pillars displayed very, very well this evening.
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When I entered this college and I saw the amount of preparations and innovations that have been displayed, I was indeed very grateful. Even the trees inside the college are wearing a new look. And I will say that perhaps we should start organising these tournaments every month so that the college will be wearing this kind of look.
”But if you leave that, we can talk about the beautiful parade that you have put up. Very, very, very spectacular. And I think for me, this is the high point.
“I know that as a young officer, I participated in this same competition in Kano. I participated in this same competition even here in this college where we brought everybody in the zone. And then we went on to have the interzonal competitions and we’ve had it in Kano, we’ve had it in Port Harcourt, we’ve had it in Makurdi. That should be our next objective.
After we challenged all the zones to organise this, we now have to bring all the zones together into a zonal competition. The second part of this is equally important. It has to be the state of infrastructure for sports.
”I was in Kano last weekend, about this time last weekend, and I saw that we are building an ultra-modern sporting facility in one of our barracks in Kano. This is something that we should extend to all the zones so that they will have the opportunity to expose their officers to competitions like this. I am ashamed to admit to the fact that when I trained here over 30 years ago, the sporting facilities that we have here wasn’t anything,” he stated.
The Customs boss urged officers and men of the Service to embrace the virtues of discipline, teamwork and strategic thinking, which he said were important lessons from competitions of this nature. He also congratulated all the winners for their outstanding performances.
