On this day (5th September 2017) last year, Team Nigeria arrived Rio, Brazil, for Paralympics 2016. Fourteen days later, they landed Nigeria’s Abuja Airport to a cheering crowd of dancers and onlookers who gathered for a glimpse of the champions and their medals.
The team had hauled 12 medals including eight gold – the best result in Team Nigeria’s Olympic and Paralympic history. Today, the same team lavish in penury as Lolade Adewuyi finds out in this special feature for The Guardian.
The Guardian article features some of the Paralympic champions and documents their travails, aspirations, despairs and hope, in the midst of a seemingly uncaring Nigerian society that has forgotten their heroes and their special need.
Every morning, Olajumoke Olajide rises around 4:30am from her Amukoko residence to get to the National Stadium where her coach, Aliu Adebayo waits for her to begin the day’s training. Her travails in this community on the outskirts of Lagos, a neighbourhood where unemployed youths run rampage and rape is rife, starts from the bus stop where she requires two people to help her board the yellow danfo bus. Many times, she has to wait for more than an hour before a helpful conductor will agree to fold up her 15 kilogrammes wheelchair and stow it into the bus and onwards to Surulere.
Olajumoke Olajide
Olajide lost the use of her legs when she was four years old after falling ill. She says an injection caused paralysis to her lower limbs, a classic case of poliomyelitis. Her parents ran helter-skelter in search of solutions, visiting healing homes, orthodox and religious as she became confined to using leg braces and crutches that came with pains so she started to crawl.
She dropped out of school in Primary Six when her parents could not afford the high cost of a special needs school and was asked to learn shoe making but could not sustain her interest.
Moving in with her aunty in Orile Iganmu led her to a chance meeting with a neighbour, a night club bouncer who encouraged her to take up sport in order to engage herself. In 2009, Olajumoke had a life changing experience when she met people with different levels of paralysis at a charity donation organised by the MTN Foundation in Rowe Park, Yaba.
“When I got there, I forgot about my disability when I saw other people that had worse than me. I cried with them but made many friends that day,” she said. She left the place with a tricycle in tow and the name of a coach at the stadium.
She went to the powerlifting arena where she met Coach Are who encouraged her to keep coming. But someone advised her instead to go to the tracks where she met Coach Adebayo who would put her in a racing wheelchair for the first time.
“He took me as his own sister and encouraged me. He showed me what I am capable of achieving,” she said.
Following the early body pains of active competition, Olajumoke settled down to track and field where she began to compete in T53, a category for athletes who have spinal injuries since her condition had worsened over time. She won the gold medal in the 100m wheelchair race at the National Sports Festival Eko 2012 in Lagos. And she became a member of the national team. In 2016, Olajumoke broke the 11-year-old African T53 100m record that was held by Kenyan Anne Wafula, at her first international race, the International Paralympic Committee Athletics Grand Prix in Dubai.
It was a moment of personal fulfilment and triumph after many disappointments. “I didn’t know the moment when I started crying, I was so happy,” she said. She was left out of the Nigerian Paralympic Team to the Rio 2016 Olympic and Paralympic Games but has not given up hope. “When I saw my colleagues win medals in Rio I cried and told myself ‘one day I will become a Paralympian and I will win something when I get there.’”
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According to figures released during the 2016 International Day of Persons with Disabilities (IDPWDs), 19million Nigerians live with at least one form of disability. But this has not stopped many from taking part in sport. Nigeria won her first gold medal at the Paralympics in 1992, four years before gold was won by an able-bodied athlete at Atlanta ‘96. At Rio 2016 where the country got a bronze in football, para-athletes won eight gold medals in a total haul of 12 which has led for calls to prioritise the Paralympics above the Olympics. Yet, the treatment that para-athletes have received has been incommensurate with their output as Onye shares an even worse experience.
Lauritta Onye
Onye was a gold medal winner at the 2016 Paralympic Games in Rio. She competed in the F40 shotput for women and she broke her own world record at the same time (What a feat!).
Click here to read the more of the story of Lauritta Onye (and others like her) on the Guardian website.
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