The burial of Peter “Dodo Mayana” Rufai has once again laid bare both the beauty and the blemishes in how Nigeria treats her sporting legends.
While the Lagos State Government, through the Lagos State Sports Commission (LSSC) and Lagos State Football Association (LSFA), showed commendable support—backed also by contributions from the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF), Odion Ighalo, and other well-meaning Nigerians, which collectively amounted to over ₦21 million—there remains a lingering concern about unity, coordination, and long-term welfare for our ex-internationals.
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Throughout the funeral rites, the Stationery Stores Supporters Trust and the Lagos Legends Club stood tall in honouring Rufai, ensuring his legacy was celebrated fittingly. That, in itself, showed what grassroots passion and organized supporter movements can achieve. But the bigger institutional players, especially the NFF, still fell short. The turnout of ex-internationals was embarrassingly poor. Where was the much-vaunted “family bond” of the Super Eagles? Where was the spirit of unity that made them conquer Africa in 1994 and stun the world at Atlanta ’96?
Instead, what has dominated the headlines is not dignified remembrance but Taribo West’s emotional outburst. His claims of Rufai’s family begging in WhatsApp groups and social media platforms were unnecessary and misleading. For clarity, the Rufai family is not one in penury; they are a royal family in Lagos, with a sitting LCDA Chairman as a close relative. So, which family members exactly were going cap-in-hand online? Taribo’s theatrics only reinforced a narrative that has followed that golden generation—the 1994 Eagles and the Atlanta ’96 Dream Team—for too long: a tendency towards self-entitlement, grievance-mongering, and disunity.
Rather than advancing solutions, such public outbursts distract from the real conversation:
How do we build sustainable structures to protect our sporting heroes beyond sentiment?
This is why I clamour for the establishment of a National Sports Legacy Fund an institutionalized framework that ensures that when legends fall on hard times or, sadly, pass on, their families are not left at the mercy of token donations or sensational headlines.
The Rufai case makes this more urgent than ever.
The truth is, Nigeria has the resources and the structures to do better.
What is missing is the will to move beyond ad-hoc gestures and emotional press conferences.
If the Stationery Stores Supporters Trust and Lagos Legends Club could rally consistently around the Rufai family till the very end, then surely the NFF and National Sports Commission can engineer a unified, transparent, and enduring welfare framework for our ex-internationals.
Peter Rufai deserved the honour he received. But he also deserved more. Our ex-internationals deserve more. Nigeria deserves better.
Until we set aside personal egos, regional divides, and the entitlement culture, and instead build true institutional legacies, we will keep having these awkward funerals—lavish in donations yet hollow in meaning.
The ball is firmly in the court of the NFF, the National Sports Commission, and the broader Nigerian sporting community.
Will they(we) rise to the occasion, or will we continue to mourn our legends with half-measures and disjointed drama?
Written by Babajimi Ogunlana,
FIFA-licensed Agent & Sports Media Practitioner,
Lagos
