Why Community Football Stadium Is Key To Curbing Youth Restiveness – Ebi Egbe
By Akeem Busari
Nigeria and Africa’s leading sports facility construction expert Chief Ebi Ezekiel Egbe, has delivered a very important message on the importance of community stadiums in a nation.
Speaking with journalists in his home town, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, the Chief Executive Officer of Monimitchelle Sports Facility Company, was emphatic about the needs to have community sports facilities, as a way of checkmating insecurity and particularly, youth restiveness.
“This is a policy-grade articulation of why community football stadiums in Nigeria’s juvenile grey areas represent the fastest and most cost-effective intervention against youth restiveness like banditry and militancy.
“In the Nigerian context, juvenile grey areas are communities characterized by high youth population (ages 12–30), limited access to education, structured recreation, and employment, weak state presence and limited civic infrastructure, high exposure to cultism, militancy, drug abuse, political thuggery, and petty crime. These environments do not primarily lack intelligence or ambition; they lack structure, opportunity, and positive identity channels.
“Football is an immediate cultural hook that requires no persuasion in Nigeria. Unlike vocational programs or ideological re-orientation schemes, football, already has emotional buy-in, community legitimacy and youth trust. The moment a functional stadium or pitch is introduced, participation begins immediately, without sensitization delays.
The renowned sports facility construction expert who is also a globally certified groundsman continued, “community football stadium naturally introduces training schedules, league calendars, coaching hierarchies, rules, discipline, and accountability. This daily structure directly competes with street idleness, gang recruitment windows and political violence mobilization.
“Idle time is the primary fuel of youth restiveness. Football consumes that time productively. Most restive youth do not wake up wanting to be violent; they want recognition, income pathways, social mobility and respect.”
A stadium transforms football from casual play into a visible pathways like local leagues, talent identification, academy progression, scholarships and professional trials. Hope is a stronger stabilizer than force, traditional responses to youth restiveness rely on policing, military presence, amnesty stipends which are very reactive and expensive.
Egbe emphasized that community football stadiums function as preventive security assets by anchoring youth around positive competition, creating community pride and shared ownership, reducing recruitment pools for criminal networks, this approach is soft power with hard outcomes,” he noted.
“A functional community stadium, immediately activates coaches and instructors, groundsmen and maintenance staff, vendors and informal traders, referees, medics, and administrators. This micro-economy reduces desperation-driven crime faster than delayed job programmes.”
Nigeria has historically over-invested in large, underutilized state stadia, capital-intensive facilities that are far from youth clusters. In contrast, community-scale football stadiums are cheaper to build, closer to youth populations, achieve higher daily usage and deliver faster social impact. One national stadium cannot stabilize ten communities. Ten community stadiums can.
Egbe, a former FIFA match agent further admonished administrators abd policymakers, how the needs to classify community football stadiums as youth development infrastructure, conflict prevention assets, public-private partnership opportunities.
“Community football stadiums in Nigeria’s juvenile grey areas are not recreational luxuries; they are strategic instruments for youth stabilization, social order, and long-term national security. No intervention absorbs youth energy, restores hope, and delivers immediate structure faster than football infrastructure placed at the community level,” he added conclusively.
