A history of factional warfare, unaccounted millions, and electoral ambitions disguised as constitutional concern.
Colonel Sam Ahmedu: The Serial Destabilizer:
Colonel Sam Ahmedu’s involvement in Nigerian basketball administration reads like a manual on institutional disruption. A 2023 Vanguard investigation described him as ‘the cog in the Federation’s wheel of progress’ a man who ‘started a war’ with successive NBBF presidents: Alhaji U.K. Umar of the Nigeria Immigration Service, Gyang Buba (now the Gbom Gwom Jos), and Alhaji Tijjani Umar.
The pattern is consistent: Col Samuel Ahmedu believes, according to that same investigation, that ‘basketball in Nigeria cannot be properly run without his involvement at the very top levels on the NBBF Board.’ When he cannot secure a position through legitimate means, he destabilizes whoever holds it until an opening emerges.
A Chronicle of Antagonism: Four Presidents, Four BITTER Wars.
To understand who Colonel Sam Ahmedu truly is, one must trace his systematic campaign against every NBBF president who dared to lead without submitting to his control. The record spans over two decades.
Alhaji U.K. Umar (Nigeria Immigration Service): The first documented victim of Ahmedu’s destabilization playbook. As a top officer with the Nigeria Immigration Service who served as NBBF President (1989-2000), U.K. Umar found himself in a power struggle with Ahmedu, who believed no one should lead Nigerian basketball without his direct involvement. Col. Amedu ran against him for the election to the office of President and lost. This was the last Nigerian election that Amedu ever ran in. The Vanguard investigation explicitly names U.K. Umar as one of the presidents Ahmedu ‘started a war’ with establishing the template that would be repeated for years to come.
Mr. Gyang Buba (Nigeria Customs Service): A retired top official of the Nigeria Customs Service, Gyang Buba now the traditional ruler Gbom Gwom Jos also fell victim to Ahmedu’s machinations. Despite Buba’s credentials and service (2000-2009), Ahmedu opposed his leadership through the same tactics of internal agitation and factional alliance-building. The pattern was becoming clear: anyone who occupied the NBBF presidency without Ahmedu’s continued blessing would face relentless opposition especially after the first tenure.
Alhaji Tijjani Umar (2009-2017): When the NBBF elected Tijjani Umar as president in 2009, Ahmedu saw a rival who ‘shouldn’t be president before him.’ Having lost out to Umar in 1993, Ahmedu ‘was desperate to make it into the Board in 2013 but failed again.’ Unable to defeat Umar through legitimate electoral means, Ahmedu began seeking alternative routes to power including taking the NBBF to the law courts.
It was during this period that Ahmedu worked with Musa Kida then a top executive at an oil company as a ‘willing tool’ who ‘had the means’ to challenge the established order. According to the Vanguard investigation, Ahmedu ‘believed that Kida… who would be well received in the sports world to see his plan through.’
When Solomon Dalung became Sports Minister in 2015, Ahmedu found the ‘arsenal to destabilize the NBBF and supported Kida as president in 2017 even if the majority of the stakeholders were polarised. The report further alleges that Ahmedu ‘worked in cahoots with a FIBA Africa where he had anchored himself as president zone 3, with the help of resources solely provided by Kida to appeal to Dalung.’ Through this coalition of political pressure and international visibility, Ahmedu finally achieved his goal: upsetting a president he believed he could not control, and working with one that is friendlier.
Musa Kida (2017-Present): The irony of Ahmedu’s current opposition to Kida cannot be overstated. This is the same man Ahmedu personally threw his weight behind his first term election as President in 2017 and also played a key role in his re-election in 2022, and was allowed unlimited access to the President, and NBBF governance.
During Kida’s first term, while Kida ‘was still in active service with the oil company he worked with, he gave Ahmedu latitude and powers as one of the heads of the Technical Committee to run the Federation freely. The Benue-born retired officer ‘saw himself as the defacto president’ and ‘sidelined all other members.’
But when Kida retired from Total Energies, and Col Sam Amedu relocated to join his family in the USA, he began asserting his own authority as the elected president, and naturally Ahmedu’s control slipped. Having lost his grip on the federation he helped to create, Ahmedu has now added Kida his own childhood friend to the list of NBBF presidents he seeks to destroy. The constitutional arguments about tenure expiration are merely the latest weapon in a decades-long campaign. The target has changed; the methodology remains identical.
Col Sam Ahmedu has never stood for an election and won, but is always hell bent on destroying those that he has helped to become President of the Federation, through fabricated crisis distortion of facts that common sense can interpret.
The latest is the one he has dumped in the public square claiming that the current tenure of this board led by kida has expired, when in real fact, he was on the side that fought the well known direct intervention by the federal government of Nigeria that stopped the board from assuming office after their 2022 elections.
In his unholy crusade, he made a few stakeholders and sports administrators believe in his tales of stories, in continuation of his desire to destroy every president he helped get elected, if he does not have control.
Olumide Oyedeji and the $2.2 Million Question:
Olumide Oyedeji’s basketball credentials are beyond dispute. A former D’Tigers ceremonial captain who led Nigeria to the historic 2015 AfroBasket triumph, playing very few minutes with 3.4 points per game during the tournament, and a reported NBA veteran (well so he claims with less than 5 points scored throughout his NBA career) and who likes to compare himself to the likes of Hakeem Olajuwon, Michael Olowokandi, Festus Ezekiel and Josh Okogie. He is currently President of the Nigeria Olympian Association and Vice President of the Nigeria Olympic Committee, and his playing career was exemplary.
But his administrative record carries an unresolved cloud that the Nigerian basketball community cannot ignore.
In January 2017, then-NBBF President Tijjani Umar secured a five-year, $2.5 million annual sponsorship from Kwese, a South African communications company a total of $12.5 million for the local basketball league. According to a detailed TheCable investigation, ‘the first tranche of the sponsorship money amounting to $1.1 million was paid directly to Umar and his league management board headed by Olumide Oyedeji in January 2017.’ A second payment of $1.1 million followed in July, bringing the total to $2.2 million.
What happened to that money? The same investigation notes that when the NBBF crisis was eventually settled, ‘the settlement did not include the issue of $2.2 million Kwese endorsement money paid to Umar’s league management board.’ The report concluded that ‘despite the successes recorded by both the male and female national teams both in Africa and on the world stage, the Kwese issue hindered the NBBF from repositioning the local league.’
The Kwesse league management committee and 2 clubs instituted a court action against the Kida led Board and the FMYSD an interim injunction was granted by the court against Kida and his team from holding any form of Premier basketball league in Nigeria. Even when the Kida Board attempted to hold and circumvent the court order by trying to institute the President’s cup, so that there can be a form of activities in domestic level, they rushed to report to the court and the judge cited Kida and his board for contempt. The case was later dismissed for lack of merit, three and half years into the first tenure of the Kida Board, which was a colossal waste of time and the biggest draw back for our domestic league. This failure must be always linked to the unpatriotic few of the Kwesse league Board that instituted the unfortunate case.
To this day, there has been no comprehensive public accounting of how that $2.2 million was utilized. Oyedeji, who headed the League Management Board that received the funds, has not provided a detailed breakdown. Yet he now positions himself as a champion of transparency, governance, and constitutional compliance.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Oyedeji was Tijani Umars Vice-President in 2017, and he is President of Hoops N’ Read basketball club, one of the clubs identified as aligned with the Tijjani Umar faction during the 2017-2018 NBBF crisis. His historical alignment with the ‘life presidency’ faction and his current crusade against Kida’s tenure represent not a principled constitutional stand, but the continuation of factional warfare by other means.
The Business of Basketball: Oyedeji’s Commercial Empire
While positioning himself as a selfless advocate for Nigerian basketball’s constitutional integrity, Olumide Oyedeji has quietly built a substantial commercial enterprise around the sport, one that raises important questions about the intersection of his personal business interests and his governance activism.
There is a claim that Oyedeji has operated the annual Olumide Oyedeji Basketball Camp through his Olumide Oyedeji Youth Foundation. The camp, charges registration fees to participating children and has processed over thousands of young participants over a decade. Operating annually at the National Stadium, Surulere a government facility, the camp draws hundreds of fee-paying children aged 5-18 from across Nigeria’s southwestern states and beyond.
Let us be clear: running basketball camps is a legitimate enterprise, and Oyedeji deserves credit for the program’s longevity and the players it has produced. The question is not whether the camps are valuable, it is whether a man with significant commercial interests in Nigerian basketball’s grassroots ecosystem should be leading a campaign to destabilize the federation’s governance.
Consider the implications: Oyedeji operates paid basketball camps. He owns Hoops N’ Read basketball club. He serves as President of the Dolphins Basketball Club of Lagos. He holds positions in the Nigeria Olympic Committee structure. Each of these roles benefits from or could be affected by who controls the NBBF and how basketball governance is structured in Nigeria.
When Oyedeji stands at a press conference demanding ‘constitutional compliance’ and attacking the current NBBF leadership, he is not a disinterested constitutional scholar. He is a businessman with multiple commercial and administrative stakes in Nigerian basketball’s ecosystem stakes that would be directly affected by a change in federation leadership.
The same man who has not publicly accounted for $2.2 million in Kwese sponsorship funds now presents himself as a champion of transparency. The same man who collects fees from thousands of Nigerian children for basketball training now claims to speak for the grassroots. The same man whose club was aligned with the ‘life presidency’ faction now demands term limits for others.
Nigerian basketball stakeholders should ask: when Oyedeji advocates for ‘a constitution that speaks for everybody, not something designed to favor a few individuals,’ is he speaking as a neutral observer or as someone positioning himself and his commercial interests for a post-Kida dispensation?
A Warning to Nigerian Basketball
Nigerian basketball stakeholders should understand exactly who is offering to ‘save’ them from the current leadership:
These are not reformers. They are recycled factional actors seeking new opportunities in a familiar playbook of destabilization. Their alliance with elements in the NSC beset by EFCC investigation allegations, unpaid athletes, and conflict of interest questions completes a coalition united not by principle, but by shared opposition to an NBBF leadership they cannot control.
The record is clear. Let those with eyes see.
From Austin Momodu.
Based in Abuja.