The Nigerian National Basketball Team, D’Tigers, has announced that it will not be competing in the 2025 FIBA AfroBasket Championship qualifiers due to insufficient funding from the government.
In a statement posted on Wednesday by the official D’Tigers account, it was revealed that despite commitments from several 2020 Olympians, the team will not be able to participate in the qualifiers due to financial constraints.
Drawn in Group B alongside Cape Verde, Libya, and Uganda, D’Tigers were slated to take part in the qualifying tournament scheduled to be held in Tunisia in the coming days.
However, with flight tickets for team members remaining unbooked due to lack of funds, Nigeria has been forced to withdraw from the qualifiers, forfeiting their chance to compete in the main tournament next year.
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This is not the first time financial issues have threatened D’Tigers’ involvement in a major basketball event. In 2019, the team faced a similar predicament ahead of the 2019 FIBA World Cup, narrowly avoiding missing out on the competition after a last-minute intervention by the Muhammadu Buhari-led government.
In contrast, the situation contrasts sharply with that of the Nigerian national football team, the Super Eagles, who recently participated in the 2023 Africa Cup of Nations after Bola Tinubu allocated 12 billion naira to support the team ahead of the tournament.
As the economic crisis in the country deepens and the value of the naira continues to decline, it remains uncertain whether Tinubu’s government will provide a late intervention to enable D’Tigers’ participation in the qualifiers.
