AFN Turns to External Platform to Fix Age Verification and Registration Problems

The Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN) has announced a partnership with Roster Athletics to introduce a competition management platform across its championships.

The move is intended to tackle persistent issues around athlete registration, age discrepancies, and data integrity that have long undermined the credibility of Nigerian athletics.

The agreement, facilitated by AFN Secretary General Israel Inwang, will see Roster Athletics provide tools for athlete registration, scheduling, start lists, seeding, and real-time results.

The platform will also be extended to state associations, clubs, and road race organizers.

AFN leadership has presented the partnership as a solution to criticism over poor data management. However, the decision highlights deeper governance failures within the federation.

Functions such as athlete registration, start list generation, and competition logistics should ordinarily be managed by AFN’s technical and competition departments.

The reliance on an external platform underscores the lack of internal systems and accountability that have left Nigerian athletics vulnerable to disputes and allegations.

AFN is also reintroducing a mandatory athlete licensing system. Each athlete will be assigned a unique license number, renewed annually, to serve as a permanent identifier throughout their career.

While this is presented as a new initiative, the licensing system is not new. When AFN was properly managed, licensing was in place and proved effective in maintaining athlete records and preventing identity confusion.

However, the federation abandoned the system in the late 2000s, contributing to the very problems it now claims to be solving. AFN is therefore committing resources to fix a failure of its own making, its inability to maintain a simple, proven registration method.

The partnership with Roster Athletics may improve transparency and efficiency in the short term. But unless AFN reforms its organizational framework and empowers its technical arms, the federation risks continuing to depend on external fixes rather than building sustainable internal systems.