About 500 Golfers To Storm Abuja For Harmony Inaugural Cup

About 500 golfers are expected to participate in the Harmony Inaugural Cup competition in Abuja.

The Captain’s Inaugural Tournament of the IBB International Golf and Country Club in Abuja is aimed at bringing together past captains of the club to compete among themselves.

Chairman of the Captains Inaugural Tournament Committee, Andrew Yakubu, at a press conference in Abuja to herald the event said the tournament would be held at the club’s standard golf course with 18 holes covering over 100 hectares.

Yakubu, a former Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (now Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited), noted that the club, which was started in 1991, has over 5000 active members, making it “one of the largest golf clubs in the country and places us at the premier status of golf courses in Nigeria.”

He said, “We have two major event days Friday and Saturday, stating that on Friday, will be the higher handicap men and ladies tournament”.

It will be followed immediately with a cocktail that will introduce the main tournament of the lower handicap people, who are the more experienced players on Saturday.

“Every activity will attract a range of prizes and trophies that will be presented to those who did well,” Mr. Yakabu said.

“Golfers look forward to this tournament to these trophies and prizes and they will be presented on the last day when we will be having the end-of-tournament dinner.”

Yakubu also faulted the perception of golf as an elitist game, stating that, “the game of golf is not necessarily an elitist game and that is why anytime we have a programme, we look for sponsors both within and outside the club.

“We promote amateurs, we promote professionals. We have professionals that don’t have the means of sponsoring themselves.

“Once you identify a talent, you support them, we have quite a number that we have done, either as a club or as individuals.

“I know that quite a number of us here have the privilege, but once talents are identified we support them, quite a number of them have gone to South Africa, some are right now in Zimbabwe; they were training to become professional golfers and that is an opportunity they have to launch themselves into both the local and international scene”.

Yakubu noted that “for the children, in fact, in a week’s time, we will kick start what we call the Children’s Clinic.

It normally comes every summer and in a week, the children will assemble and nobody takes record of who their parents are.

We are sponsoring this one here, a few weeks ago, we did one in Kaduna…and all over the country to stimulate the interest of the younger ones in this game of golf and to remove that impression that it is an elitist game.”

The ex-GMD of NNPC recalled that the club held its Annual General Meeting in April where it elected a new leadership led by the Captain 2022, Michael Onoja Ekoja, who is the 25th captain of the club.

This article was originally published on Naija News