Miss Football Nigeria, a new beauty pageant targeted at getting more support for local leagues, as opposed to foreign ones, has been launched in Nigeria.
The pageant, officially called Queen Of Nigeria Football, is an initiative by Miss Football Nigeria with a focus on beauty, football, entertainment and youth empowerment.
According to the National Director of Media and Publicity, Gambo Jagindi, the events are aimed at making about 80 million Nigerian football lovers to take part in local leagues.
Jagindi noted that Nigeria is yet to harness the potential of her football loving populace and that the patronage of foreign leagues is costing the nation so much resources.
“Football has become one of the top three global sports commanding hundreds of millions of addicted fans and followers in more than two third of the countries of the world combined.
“In Nigeria, the addiction is so strong that football is, as it stands today, the only unifying factor that dismantles the barriers of ethnicity, religion, class or political divide. It knows no age limitation in terms of passion and viewership.”
Reliable research findings show that, out of the about 200 million Nigerians, over 80 million, accounting for over 40 percent of the population, are passionate followers of football.
“Unfortunately, here in Nigeria, much has not been achieved in taking positive advantage of the huge demography and attendant addiction for football by the young people to promote national development, job and wealth creation.
“Miss Football Nigeria Project has been carefully developed and recently rebranded to deliberately sensitize and mobilize the Nigerian youth and young persons towards participating and investing in our local football as a means of recreation, entertainment as well as viable stream of income,” he said.
The media director added that the project, among other things, aims to strategically capture the interest of at least four million football-loving Nigerian youths and sensitize them on the dangers and economic disadvantages of over-patronizing foreign football matches at the expense of our domestic leagues.
According to him, it also targets the tertiary institutions in Nigeria, students and youth groups, growing a massive fan base for local leagues, building economic structure for young people in Nigeria and empower young women.
He said that the project specifically targets national and state youth bodies, students of higher institutions of learning, community youth leaders, youth groups, young artisans and out-of-school youths in the market places.
He added that the project was being run in partnership with the National Youth Council of Nigeria, National Association of Nigerian Students, Nigerian Youth Parliament, Youth Sports Federation of Nigeria, Sports Writers Association of Nigeria, Nigerian Football Federation and Federal Ministry of Youth and Sports Development among others.
– APA
