IDPs, sports and resettlement efforts in Northeast

Sports include all forms of competitive physical activity through organized and casual participation to enhance talents, wellness, skills and cooperation among the participants. The most important thing about sports is that, it’s one of the means with huge potentials to resolve conflicts and create cohesiveness in a society to promote peaceful coexistence. However, when sports […]

Sports include all forms of competitive physical activity through organized and casual participation to enhance talents, wellness, skills and cooperation among the participants. The most important thing about sports is that, it’s one of the means with huge potentials to resolve conflicts and create cohesiveness in a society to promote peaceful coexistence. However, when sports talents and skills are discovered and develop to meet international standard, this will serve as a factor that will bring about development, peace and unity in a community.

Peace building can take many forms at the international, national, state or grassroots level, but sports is one of the tools that can be used to provide a useful way of creating a space or an environment in which people can come together to work towards a particular objective and to show respect for others and share space and equipment.

Sport is becoming part of peace building process worldwide as it brings people together from different backgrounds, culture, tradition, dialects, language, ethnicity, religion, geographic location and ideology towards a common goal which is promoting peace and unity in diversity.

It is against this background on the significant contributions of that sport should be deployed in the north eastern part of Nigeria and indeed Nigeria that is confronted by the insurgency. Considering this peculiar situation in the region, sports can be used in the reintegration and resettlement efforts and improve social relationships between communities and groups that are affected by the conflicts. This is because sport is one of the avenues that can produce a sense of belonging, reduce psychological imbalanced and helps internally displaced persons (IDPs) to bounce back to normalcy.

There are quite a number of non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other international donor agencies often organized local sporting activities aimed at giving psycho-social supports to IDPs particularly in Adamawa, Yobe and Borno State. Perhaps the organisers are of the opinion that nothing can be done to restore mental fitness in these traumatized IDPs than taking local sporting activities in to consideration, so that this will help to reduce some bad experiences they had as a result of insurgency.

Even the United Nations (UN) recognised how powerful sports is, as a means of restoring peace and unity in post-conflicts situations. In many occasions, UN has taken sports to where there is violence to promote peace. For instance, in 2007, the United Nations peacekeeping mission in Liberia (UNMIL), the IOC and UNOSDP teamed up to implement the country-wide “sport for peace “ program with the goal of fostering peace in the aftermath of the civil war and to educate the youths on the consequences of war and other criminal acts.

In the light of this example, it is worthy to note that, apart from religion, sport is a forum that can bring people together for a common goal. Therefore, sportsmanship, team work, respect and communication skills aid in reducing tensions as well as prevent conflicts and other social vices among youths.

 

Shettima Lawal Monguno, Department of Mass Communication, University of Maiduguri, Borno State