The federal government of Nigeria has been charged with the need to get new ideas and policies that would make funding of sports easier in the country.
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This is sequel to massive lamentations among members of Team Nigeria to the recent African Games in Ghana, where issues of poor funding reared another ugly head for the nation.
Many of the athletes and coaches uttered various lamentations about poor welfare, late camping, substandard kit, and inadequate remuneration, which accounted for some below par performances by the respective sports representatives.
Although Nigeria eventually placed second on the final medals table in Accra, Ghana, a cross-section of the contingent members pointed to the huge gap between them and first placed Egypt as confirmation of missing links in their camp.
They were unanimous in concluding that Team Nigeria would have given Egypt a better challenge for the top spot had proper funding been available from the Nigerian government, which would spur the athletes and coaches to excel in their events.
This line of thought has now been supported by the president of Nigeria Taekwondo Federation (NTF), Abdullahi Saidu-Baba, who initially wanted to shy away from the question, so that he would not appear to be an administrator complaining about the system that he is involved in.
He, however, eventually opened up on where the problems are regarding funding of Nigerian sports and proffering some suggestions as solutions.
Saidu-Baba stated at length: “There is no sports federation president that will not give you the same story, except for a few others that have good sponsorship and marketing drives. Those ones, maybe, are riding their horse on a smooth ground.
“For all others, believe me, it’s not easy. We have been using our personal funds to push federation activities. The board members are not even helping matters. For me, I believe improved sponsorship will go a long way in getting us better results.
“We need to package ourselves better, market ourselves, make ourselves marketable. That’s how people will see what is good in us, develop interest, and come in to sponsor us.
“Aside from that, the government can bring in ideas like the lottery issue. It’s a good one. When the former minister launched the policy on sports, I said this is a good drive but, up till now, it hasn’t been implemented. If that had been implemented, it would have been a good thing.
“We need more ventures like that because sports is big business; it’s very big business. However, if you don’t package it in a way people will see it and see the goal in it, nobody will want to invest in it.
“We must also diversify and change our present outlook. If you talk sports, people think only of football. Football, football only all the time. Basketball, though, is also making waves because of the finance they are getting from the international body; but how many sports in Nigeria get such support?
“For taekwondo, we do have grants, but they come in forms of equipment, not that they give us physical cash. They only give grants for equipment or developmental programmes. I’ll love a situation in which I would be able to assess funds, even place my athletes on scholarship, or put them in high-performance training centres across the world.
“For me, finance is key. I’m an accountant, so I know what it means to have funds. No matter how good your budget may look like, if you don’t have finance to execute it, it’s just information on paper.
“In moving forward, I like to call on the government to look at other ways of funding sports. Why not create sports tax, just like we have education tax. Or start a sports development levy that would be mandatory for all companies operating in Nigeria.
“That tax will go into a pool so that the federal ministry of sports does not have to wait for government allocation to fund sports. Whatever comes into the sports development pool would be shared among the various sporting federations, and each would be held accountable to confirm what they did with the money allocated to them.
“It would be a leverage that would go a long way in relieving each of the sports federations from depending solely on the federal government’s funds. It would be a big relief if the federal government finds other ways of funding sports federations in the country directly and indirectly.”
