The Director-General of the National Sports Commission (NSC), Dr Patrick Ekeji has called for alternative avenues for funding the sports sector. He said that will help sports achieve maximum results. Ekeji believes that the present system where sports is funded from the national budget is detrimental to achieving results. “We need to look for alternative ways of funding sports, an alternative way of making government not to fund sports directly because of the demands of the other sectors. Government should primarily invest in sports, but not by directly giving us funds from the budget but by making it possible for sports not to be funded from the federation account.? I rather think we should have our allocations from (financial) inflows like taxes, oil refunds, just like the Education Trust Fund is funded. In fact, there are very many areas where a percentage of such inflows would be made available for us in sports and for our business,’’ the former national team player said.
The one-time Green Eagles coach said the commission is capable of facilitating the discovery of world sports stars in Nigeria with better funding, going by the abundance of talents in the country. “We can do a lot; we can produce world stars, those who are better than the Usain Bolts of this world, but things have to change from the way we do it,’’ Ekeji said. He lamented the drawbacks being faced as a result of the present budgetary process, pointing at the state of Nigeria’s preparations for the 2012 Olympic Games. He said Nigeria has been unable to pay an advance of 20 per cent (about N28 million) agreed for the use of a university camping facility in London. Nigeria was asked to pay 584,000 pounds sterling (about N146 million) for its athletes and officials to use the Surrey university sports facilities days before the Olympic Games. “The major challenge we have here is that funds for sports go through the normal budgeting but the funds are not available until the processes come to an end. Now, we have not been able to pay that money. President Goodluck Jonathan had presented to the National Assembly the 2012 budget, which is the normal thing in our set-up.
Thereafter, the National Assembly will have to take a look at it and approve. But countries that want to win gold medals at the Olympics don’t wait for budgetary allocations. They have gone beyond that by now. We have just about N65 million to run our sports monthly, and this is not just enough. We need to have a change.’’ Ekeji cried.