The Minister of Sports Development, John Enoh, has stated that, unlike his counterparts in other ministries, he is unable to develop the sector due to the constraints imposed by the laws governing various sporting federations. He said he would have made changes to the leadership of many sports federations due to the shortcomings he noticed when he took over but he is not empowered to do so. In an interview on Channels TV monitored by our correspondent yesterday, the minister lamented that without major reforms to ensure the right people are managing various federations, the sports sector may continue to suffer.
“I have expressed my intentions regarding the need to reform our federations. The leadership of these federations is elected by congresses for a term of four years. For example, my colleague in aviation may examine the agencies and parastatals under his ministry and find that there are people who may not be able to contribute enough to his goals.
He can then work towards replacing them. However, the minister of sports does not have that luxury. We need to look into this,” he said.
He said that despite the limitations, he is still keen to ensure that anyone found culpable for the national embarrassment in Paris pays at the end of the investigation he has initiated. “You don’t fire unless you interrogate, some of the issues that caused embarrassment, like the Favour Ofilli matter, the kit issue, we are not going to let them lie low, heads will roll if we found people liable for the kind of negative publicity we had at the Olympics,” he said. Many Nigerians are upset that despite the country spending a whopping N12 billion on the Games and coming back without any medals, while only N2 billion was spent at the previous Games about three years ago.
However, Enoh said contrary to widespread insinuations, the N12 billion made available by President Bola Tinubu was for both the Olympics and Paralympics Games. “The N12 billion is for both the Olympics and the Paralympics; the Olympics gulped a little over N8 billion and more than N3 billion to be spent on the Paralympics. Imagine what N2 billion was three years ago, the Olympics is an international event and you talk about it in terms of dollar equivalent.
I am not saying it was insufficient because we made a budget which was provided for but I must add that what we do as a country is that we fund competitions but we don’t fund the training and preparation for these events.”.
