Solomon Dalung has cautioned teams and athletes about requesting for money. He also revealed the ministry’s plan for the coming year. The minister then explained the challenges facing the ministry so far. While speaking to journalists in Jos, Plateau state, youth development and sports minister, Solomon Dalung was quoted as saying:
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“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 Daily Post, he also explained that: “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 cautioned them, warning: “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.”
Dalung also spoke on the plans for the coming year saying: “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.”
Explaining the reason for the shift to the grassroots, he said: “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.”
The minister also complained that some Nigerian athletes had suffered discrimination in foreign countries, urging the athletes to look more inwards than outside the country.
He concluded by speaking on the lessons learned from 2016 and gave a directive to all federations to submit their work plan for the coming year in January, 2017, so that plans could be made in advance to prevent embarrassment.
Meanwhile, Dalung has promised Nigerian youths that the sports ministry will learn from its mistakes to make 2017 a trophy laden year for Nigeria.
Speaking at the town hall meeting with the youths at the state house banquet hall Abuja, Dalung promised that the sports ministry will learn from its mistakes in 2016.
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