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WAFCON 2026 Fall-out: Talent Is Least Of Nigeria’s Problems That Prevent Good Results In Sports – Nkechi Obi

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As a fact-finding panel commences inquiries into reasons behind recent setbacks hitting all levels and gender of Nigerian football, one of the country’s former officials, Nkechi Obi has declared that talent is not a major problem affecting the nation.

Sports247 reports that Obi, who is an erstwhile head of Nigeria Women Football League (NWFL), noted that the country has an abundance of talent but administrators keep on placing priority on hunting for what they already have, instead of providing platforms for those natural resources to be fully utilised.

Read Also: ‘A Welcome Development’ — Elumelu Backs NFF Fact-Finding Committee

Obi forwarded a deep insight into her viewpoint and made suggestions on the way forward while speaking during ‘Hot Seat’ segment of Sports247’s television programme, Inside Naija Sports, which streams online via YouTube and airs on NTA News 24 at 10am every Saturday.

She added, “We need a pipeline that converts raw talents to finished products seamlessly. The back-end support for this comes in terms of infrastructure that ensure everyone at the grassroots can participate in sports.

“Unfortunately, the conversation in Nigeria has always been about discovery of talents, but that should not be our focus. Talent is the least of our problems.

“Nigeria is like fertile soil where talents spring up naturally. However, the problem we have is how to channel our raw talents into finished products.”

The erudite and highly articulate sports guru, who is also a marketing expert, went on to profer steps that can take Nigeria out of the woods and put the country’s football teams firmly back on track.

Obi added, “We can put things right by creating a vibrant ecosystem on which sporting activities are built. For that to happen, we need adequate infrastructure; so that the whole community can get involved in sports.

“That means, first and foremost, we need to encourage mass participation in sports and put in place a market development strategy. This means we need a community driven participatory strategy that involves everybody who has an interest in sports.

“If you gather as many people as possible together at the community, the ones who are talented will naturally emerge and stand out. That would make it easier to start building your teams on a regular basis.”

She concluded by reeling out the merits of a mass-participation strategy and various benefits that would fall into place for the country, especially in terms of a steady reservoir of raw talents waiting to be harnessed in a gradual progression over time.

“This strategy will help us build a healthier citizenry, develop a vibrant market for goods and improve our service delivery efforts. This will also give us adequate feedback on the financial implications of our sports activities.

“We will be able to judge whether our sports sector is worth billions or not. We will see it by watching data and statistics that flow with the number of people involved in our sports and what they gain from it.

“Many people in Nigeria don’t like looking at data, but I follow it a lot. We have to start looking at figures to know if we are improving or not and what to do next.

“For instance, Little Baseball in America has 80 million children playing every weekend and they can gauge what economic gains can come out of it – if every child buys a bat, gloves, boots and a ball. That’s how you calculate economic development in sports, and you can make projections about dividends it will bring the country as a whole.”

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Africa’s biggest bank targets stake in OPay ahead of IPO

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Africa’s largest bank by assets, Standard Bank Group is in negotiations with Nigerian fintech company OPay ahead of the latter’s planned initial public offering (IPO) in the United States.

OPay is working with Citigroup, Deutsche Bank AG and JPMorgan Chase & Co to help list the company in New York, which is expected to take place later in 2026, according to Bloomberg.

The amount Standard Bank intends to invest and the stake it is seeking in OPay remain unknown as the fintech, backed by SoftBank Group Corp and Sequoia Capital, targets a US IPO valuation of $4 billion.

The potential investment in OPay followed Standard Bank Group’s disclosure that it plans to increase its investments in companies across Africa in June.

The lender said it would deploy $15.4 billion to tap opportunities in Nigeria and other key markets across the continent.

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READ ALSO: Ecobank, Cornerstone Insurance, Africa Prudential top stock pick this week

Since it was created in 2018, OPay has grown into one of Nigeria’s largest digital financial platforms, offering payment, savings, credit and other financial services as a mobile money operator.

In previous years, it has expanded beyond Nigeria into emerging markets across Africa and Asia, including Indonesia, Pakistan, and Egypt.

OPay is one of Nigerian fintech companies, including Moniepoint and Flutterwave, that have raised funding through foreign means over the years to finance growth and expand their operations beyond the continent.


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Cursor capitalizes on GitHub frustration, launches rival hosting platform

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For as long as anyone can remember, GitHub has been the de facto code host preferred by a majority of developers. However, in recent times, the platform has struggled with widely reported outages and performance degradation and, as it drops the ball, Cursor is waiting to pick it up.

The AI startup, which is now officially a part of SpaceX, launched Origin this week — a new code-hosting platform designed to do all of the things that developers typically use GitHub for: collaboratively work on codebases, browse and edit them, handle pull-requests (edits made by others asking to be added to the main codebase), and store them in repositories.

This seems like a natural next step for Cursor, whose primary focus until this point has been selling automated web development services through its AI Code Editor. Cursor has also said that “agent native” features will soon be available for Origin, although hasn’t shared many details yet. The company also says it is building a wider “app ecosystem” to support broader coding efforts within Origin.

Interestingly enough, using Origin doesn’t require a user to stop using GitHub. Indeed, Origin is designed to allow developers to work alongside GitHub and pass code back and forth between the two in an interoperable manner.

“Your GitHub repos can sit alongside the ones Cursor hosts,” Cursor says in its blog. “Connect GitHub to Cursor, pick your org, and you’ll see the repos you can sync. Select one and Cursor pulls it in.”

The launch of Origin coincides with ongoing frustration over a perceived dip in GitHub’s services. Indeed, on the same day that Cursor launched its new platform, GitHub suffered a quite lengthy worldwide outage. For over six hours, the site’s functions were reportedly degraded, with a nearly 20% error rate worldwide.

This isn’t the first time this has happened. either. Earlier this year, after a rash of outages, GitHub announced new actions to sate unhappy coders as its availability problems seemed to escalate. More broadly, the platform has suffered 257 outages over the past year, a recent analysis by LeadDev states. Such persistent issues have led to “a visible exodus of high-profile users,” writes LeadDev’s reporter Charles Humble.

Still, if Cursor wants to compete with GitHub, it will have its work cut out for it. According to GitHub’s own metrics, some 180 million developers use its platform as of last October. The platform, which was founded in 2007 and acquired by Microsoft in 2012, continues to be the largest source-code host in the world.

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