Kunle Solaja’s Home Truth to Swedish Television

Ibikunle Solaja is Nigeria’s foremost soccer diarist and the country’s most capped FIFA World Cup journalist who has attended all the tournaments from Italia ’90 to date. He is covering his ninth World Cup here in Qatar. The former Editor of Kick Off Magazine and Soccer Star is in a special class of football writers recognised by FIFA. Apart from also authoring several books on the game and its administration at home and beyond, Solaja is a moving encyclopaedia on anything football. With this background, some Swedish television reporters doing hatchet job on Qatar thought they had found a willing tool to use to drive home their script of rubbishing the 2022 World Cup host country over its stance on migrant workers and LGBTQ. They asked the Nigerian of his opinion on Qatar’s treatment of migrant workers and why gays, lesbians and people of other queer orientations were not allowed to freely express themselves here. True to type, the Ikenne-born journalist, instead of answering the question, gave the reporters lessons in proper behaviour and how to respect the feelings of a host nation. He asked the television reporters why migrants and others from parts of the world are treated with disdain in Western Europe? Solaja insisted that until there is better treatment for blacks and other races, Europeans should not be asking Qatar to put aside its culture and accept LGBTQ as a way of life. By the time he finished with the television reporters, Solaja turned to this diarist and said: “I know they will not publish or televise this home truth because it is not what they wanted to hear from me.”