Afrobasket 2025: D’Tigress apprehensive as flight tickets trickle in from NSC

This has not been the best of times for African champions, D’Tigress of Nigeria. The Afrobasket defending champions are billed to fight to retain their crown at the 2025 edition of the championship in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, which tips off on July 25, but up till yesterday, the girls did not know how they would get to the venue.

Reports said that the National Sports Commission (NSC), whose responsibility it is to ferry the team to Abidjan, does not have sufficient money to do that and take on other issues affecting the team.

The NSC, officials of the team told The Guardian yesterday, has been sending flight tickets in bits to the team more than one month behind schedule.

These tickets were meant to have reached the players in May. So, the question the girls have been asking without getting answers is: “Will we travel as a team or one by one as the tickets come?”

Checks at the Nigeria Basketball Federation (NBBF) office showed that the NSC approved for the girls to receive their flight tickets to Abuja for the national camp by June. “The federation was forced to route all the players, who are largely based in the US and Europe, to Abuja, when the NSC rejected the federation’s old pattern of running one camp in the USA before the final team list is drawn up. Nearly all the players listed for the 2025 Afrobasket are based abroad,” an NBBF source said.

“When the NSC insisted that every stage of the camping be held in Nigeria, the NBBF rolled out the plan for camping, including an international tournament in Abuja, which was meant to be the last stage before the final list of players is drawn up.

“We are deeply involved with organising the tournament, but marketing it became very difficult as the days went by, chiefly because the players were not in the country. Nobody was sure of anything. It would have been an easy sell-out to the Abuja community if D’Tigress were in town by June as planned. This is not good for the country,” the source added.

Some of the players were expected yesterday in Abuja, but it is not exactly certain how many of the players can be in town for the Homecoming Tournament, originally set to begin in the FCT tomorrow and wrap up on Monday. Togo and Kenya are still expected to play against the African champions.

The source said that the “Home Coming tournament was designed to be a huge morale round-off to the camping, but it has now become the start of their camping and perhaps the only meaningful session the team can have before they board the flight to Abidjan. But even as they prepare to enter the African championship with little or no training, no clear itinerary has been built for the Afrobasket, as the tickets have not been purchased.”

The NSC officials said last week that the challenge rested largely on flight availability as they had not been able to secure enough seats for the team.

“There are just a few west coast flights and we have not been able to get a single flight that can accommodate the entire delegation,” one official said.

However, the source at the NBBF said that the issues arose because the federation’s president, Musa Kida, “declined to personally fund the trip and get refunds later. He is still being owed hundreds of millions of naira arising from personal funding of some competitions in the past years. The continuous change of ministers and directors general at the sports ministry has not helped matters.”