Special Feature: Segun Odegbami's Diary on Africa Military Games 2024

AMGA 2024 Daily Diary

Day 10

There are only three more days to go at AMGA 2024. With many of the sports events concluded, the freedom of the athletes to move around and experience the sites and sounds of Abuja has increased. 

Everyone is more relaxed now and the festival of friendship has truly begun. 

The hotel lobbies are full of merchants of various indigenous goods and money changers doing brisk business. The weakness of the Naira has empowered all the visitors. 

In that mood, I set out from my hotel to the MKO Abiola Stadium Complex. 

I get to there around noon. 

Tunji, my guest and friend from the USA, calls. He is a businessman. He has brought a new and exciting technology to ‘feed’ various sectors within the Nigeria eco-system. He wants to use the opportunity and environment of AMGA 2024 to demonstrate the capacity of a special Drone that can light up large swathes of land at night. I imagine the sectors and the possibilities that exist to harness and harvest such a product? 

Before coming to Nigeria he showed me videos of the drone being deployed to light up construction, accident, camp and demolition sites, outdoor sports training and competition arenas, border posts, military facilities and so on. He had me salivating, and my imagination titillating. 

Tunji seizes the opportunity of the hosting of AMGA 2024 and comes to Nigeria to demonstrate the efficacy and efficiency of the product to interested prospective end users, particularly those in sport and related to AMGA 2024. 

So, Tunji is around. He is waiting for me at the main bowl of the MKO Abiola National Stadium. We meet by the tracks and take a few pictures. 

I take the matter up from there. I start to make calls to persons that may be interested and be involved in the LIVE demonstration of this Drone technology within the stadium grounds. 

I contact several persons. The interest and excitement is palpable. I even take Tunji to visit the Chairman and the Director-General of the National Sports Commission in their office. I secure not just their interest but assurance of their actual participation. 

We set it all up for 8pm when the sports events within the stadium would have been concluded, and the chosen environment within the stadium, dark enough for the purpose, would be free of encumbrances. 

So, all sone, I take Tunji and his crew to lunch. Guess where? Akisco Restaurant, my ‘joint’ outdoors under the canopy of a special tree with thorns on its Trunk and branches. 

Tunji swears that this is the best eating experience he has ever had in Abuja. 

We return to the National Stadium in the evening. I visit the fun park that is just gathering momentum for the athletes seeking fun at night in music, dance and other artistic performances. 

The soldier-athletes are having fun. Most are leaving the main bowl area where athletics events have just been concluded. I miss all of that in order to prepare for this demonstration. 

Soon, it is 8pm. Tunji and his flight crew are ready at our chosen location. The entire National Sports Commission Directorate are ready. The staff from other sectors are also on ground. We all meet at the dark Practice Pitch 1 of the stadium where the demonstration has been set up to take place. 

We are all excited. 

The place is pitch dark. Tunji and his crew are ready. We, the spectators, are standing some distance away from the truck carrying the flight equipment. 

With the light from a small search-light, we can see the drone and the crew on the field. The drone comes on with a high pitch buzzing sound of roaring motors, accompanied by two powerful bright lights that look like the headlamps of a miniature car. 

The crew goes through some private ceremony as I try to make out events from our position. 

Eventually, the drone takes off into the night sky, its light and noise cutting through the darkness and quiet of this part of the stadium. 

It zigzags, a tether attached to its tail, probably to stop it from flying astray, slashing the misty rays created by the headlights of the drone in Harmattan. 

Then it happens. As suddenly as its left the earth, it zooms back to it, crashing with a thud onto the grassy field. It lifts off crazily again and crashes back again. The control crew rush to its rescue, cutting out the engine of the drone that has gone out of control. 

The lights go out. The sound disappears. The entire environment is swallowed by darkness, and silence punctuated only by bated breaths exhaling after the eerie experience of the past few seconds. It is the end of the show. 

The experiment has gone awry and has become a ‘disaster’. It is clear that something went wrong with the flight controls, and that the demonstration of this revolutionary technology will have to wait till another day in the future.  

AMGA 2024’s ‘loss’ will only be the pabsence of the optical attachment of that aspect of Drone Technology to the Games. 

Meanwhile, there are 3 days to go to the end of these fascinating Games of the Military, by the Military and for the Military in Africa. 

I have throughly enjoyed the military traditions that permeate every strand of AMGA 2024, constant reminders to the rest of us civilians that we are in a ‘military zone, all trespassers will be dealt with summarily’…whatever that means.

“Kai, but as for me, I still fear soldier small o”

Dr. Olusegun Odegbami MON, OLY, AFNIIA, FNIS