The Minister of Sports and Youth Development, Barrister Solomon Dalung, on Friday said the Ministry has directed all federations under it to submit their work plan for the incoming year to avoid delay in the release of funds as experienced in the past.
He said “government processes is not like ATM”.
Dalung stated this in a chat with journalists in Jos, the Plateau State Capital.
“We need to understand the administrative nature of sports in Nigeria; heaping blames on the Ministry of Sports and Youth Development, has been the tradition, we do it with some form of celebrity, but we take responsibility.
“However, in real administrative practices, the federations are even responsible for fixing the bonuses, the ministry is not part of it.”
According to him, “These federations are autonomous, they are self sustaining, what government does is to intervene.”
“The practice is when a team qualifies, the team becomes a Nigerian team, but the federations in trying to hold on to their hegemony of autonomy, they will not present the team, but they will only present problems and that’s how we have been operating, each time they come for intervention we have graciously been able to do that”, he explained.
“But if they bring it late, then they cannot blame us; because like I said, government processes is not ATM, it has procedures.
“If you are requesting money, it has to come to the Ministry of Youth and Sports and then the minister will send it to the President, the President will send it to the relevant ministries that are involved before it returns to the Ministry of Finance, where payment will be made.”
Speaking on the Ministry’s plans for the incoming year, Dalung said, “We have decided to reconfigure the sports architecture to make it more encompassing, more purposeful and it should also be grassroots oriented.
“If you take a review of advanced nations, United States of America for example, has institutional sports, which is called school sports; and most of their athletes are gotten from there. But reverse is the case here, most of our athletes are foreign based.”
The Minister further explained that, “During camping, we spend so much on them, we must reverse that trend, we must look inward to be able to stimulate the environment, to unbundle the enormous potentials that we have, that we are determined to give to Nigerians.
“If we build a better society, Nigerians will not leave for elsewhere.
“One of the greatest challenge in Nigeria is that we do not have high performance system in this country, and without a high performance system, modern sports have become science.
“For instance with sports technology, you can create a higher altitude of 3000 feet above sea level in a room condition not necessarily coming to Jos, I saw this in South Africa.
“So if these things are necessary for training, we must have them here in order to create good training facilities that will encourage our sports men and women to serve”, he stressed.
The Minister lamented that some Nigerian athletes had suffered discrimination in foreign countries, urging the athletes to look more inwards than outside the country.
However, Dalung said the Ministry learnt from the experiences of 2016, and had given directive to all federations to submit their work plan for the coming year in January, 2017, so that it could plan ahead to save the ministry from embarrassment.
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