After Nigeria failed to win any medals in the Olympics, sporting officials are under pressure from accusations of incompetence and calls for reform over what the sports minister branded a "disastrous outcome" in Paris.
While smaller nations on the continent came home with multiple medals, the "giant of Africa" left empty-handed for the first time since the 2012 London Olympics.
Despite fielding continental champions like 100m hurdles record holder Tobi Amusan, Africa's most populous nation did not live up to Olympic expectations.
A day after the Olympics closed, former and current Olympians lashed out at the country's sporting federations calling for a shakeup in organisations they say failed their athletes.
"I must apologise to our compatriots and reflect on what went wrong," Sports Minister John Owan Enoh said on social media after Paris.
He said when he assumed the ministry less than a year before the Games, he learned that Nigeria's Olympics preparations had not even started.
"As a country, we deserve more," he said. "Let's turn the disastrous outcome of the 2024 Olympics to a huge positive for Nigerian sports."
Nigeria's best haul in the Olympics was in Atlanta in 1996 when the team won two golds, one silver and three bronzes. Beijing brought five medals in 2008, but there were zero in London four years later.
Atlanta Olympics gold medal winner in the long jump, Chioma Ajunwa, said Nigeria's sporting federations needed a shakeup to bring in sports people who knew what they were doing.
“One thing I think the people in the helm of affairs should do is to overhaul the sports department in Nigeria. They should stop recycling the old administrative officers that never know what they are doing," she told Arise News channel.
"When you put people who know their onions, we would not be speaking in this manner.
“Our problem is that we are using those that never knew what sports is, those that never did sports in their life. When you go to the ministry of sports, before 3pm, they have all gone home.”
(with newswires)
