Commission plans street soccer, school sports to engage youths
The Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), says it plans to introduce street soccer at the community and local government levels in order to keep the youths engaged productively.
The acting Managing Director of NDDC, Mrs. Ibim Semenitari, revealed this on Sunday in Abuja, and added that such engagements had the capacity to unite the people of the region.
Semenitari added that sporting activities such as school sports and debates, which the commission plans to introduce, will go a long way to promote socialisation.
“We want to start various things; we are looking at two kinds of things; we are looking at getting a community or local government sporting activities, where we are doing street soccer.
“So we’ll just go to communities and the boys are busy training for the next training states, for regional, training for finals. They are too busy training to have time to be idle; that’s on the one hand.
“But in the second hand, we are trying to go back to secondary school sports because I recall that while growing up a lot of the friends I made from other secondary school, I made during games, debates during activities.
“We just concluded that what the debate between girls in engineering, mathematics and science (GEMS) competitions did was bind children from across the region together.
“A lot of people got married from these secondary school sports.
“There’s a socialisation that comes from it; you see that you are not different and you see that the problems are not just yours alone if you are able to come together and think towards problems solving.”
She said the GEMS programme was aimed at encouraging innovative female students to develop passion in disciplines such as science, technology, engineering and mathematics.
According to her, the commission has awarded N25million scholarships to five secondary school students to pursue their educational careers up to tertiary level.
