Nigerian chess scene will hug global limelight this week when the former world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, hit the country for a three-day visit with his famous Chess Foundation.
The visit will be the first time the chess genius will be coming to any West African nation but more importantly the visit may be the tonic the chess federation needs to kick start its long aged dream of ‘Chess In School’ programme, which is already existing on a small scale in some private institutions.
The President of the Nigeria Chess Federation, Lekan Adeyemi, disclosed over the weekend that the entire board of the federation is delighted to receive the chess icon and his team for formal discussions on the possibility of the Kasparov Chess Foundation, coming to play a key role in chess development among the pupils in Nigeria.
“We (the NCF board) are glad that Kasparov and his team are coming here to work out the modalities for his Chess Foundation to operate here too after its success in other developing chess nations,” Adeyemi commented in a telephone interview.
Although the Russian Grandmaster is a candidate for the next FIDE election in August this year, Adeyemi reinstated that the visit is strictly for chess development and not politics.
He said: “We are aware that he is a candidate for the next FIDE election but Nigeria is yet to make a stand on whether we will support him or not.
“More importantly, this Foundation has been in operation in Africa since 2012 and we are glad to be a beneficiary of this great icon’s initiative in chess.”
According to the itinerary released on Sunday, the 11-man team will arrive Abuja on Thursday night in a private jet and are expected to meet the board of the NCF at the Hilton Hotel Abuja.
On Friday, the combined team of the KCF-AFRICA and the NCF will visit the Minister of Sport and Chairman, National Sports Commission, the Minister of Education and the Executive Secretary, Universal Basic Education.
The team will fly down to Lagos where it will meet with prominent captains of industries, the media and stakeholders of chess in the country before departing the country in the continuation of the tour of other African countries.
The Kasparov Chess Foundation officially launched its African operations in March 2012, with the aim of promoting chess as a tool for education and social development across the broader African continent.
The foundation, in its bid to facilitate its planned expansion, recently partnered with the trustees of a proven chess in schools programme called MiniChess.
The MiniChess programme has been developed over years of teaching chess to “entry phase” learners (five to eight years) as part of their school curriculum.
It is currently used with great success in more than 170 schools in South Africa and reaches more than 45,000 learners per week.
The programme is expanding rapidly and we already have advanced plans in place to launch formal operations in Malawi, Rwanda and Uganda during the 2014 school year.
It is hoped that in the next few years, the MiniChess programme will reach out to the entire African continent as a tool to help address the educational needs of foundation phase learners.
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