The bottlenecks faced by sports federations to secure funds for their programmes continued to generate reactions as Africa’s number one table tennis player, Quadri Aruna has charged the Federal Government to disburse budget allocation directly to sports federations.
The Portugal-based athlete however, lamented the absence of Nigeria team at the just concluded World Youth Championships (WYC) despite being listed among the qualified teams for the global tournament.
Specifically, Aruna believes disbursing the funds directly to the federations would help them to execute their programmes as well as attend more international tournaments.
“I think there should be an end to the idea of sports federation running to Abuja to get funds in order to attend international competitions. Most of the federations’ presidents have been funding their federations’ programmes through personal funding and despite this going for years, nothing seems to change in the country. Most federations apart from football have not been attending international events because the usual no funds from the Ministry of Sports Development. There are no grassroots programmes in place across all federations and even some of them that managed to organise events are not being supported by the government,” he said.
“In wrestling, Daniel Igali has been funding the sport while in table tennis, Barrister Wahid Oshodi and the Vice President, Adesoji Tayo and others have funding most of the programmes of the federations personally from their pockets and it is time government released funds directly to the federation and they can monitor how the money is spent annually. I don’t fancy the idea of always running to Abuja to seek for funds and always meeting a brick wall should come to an end,” he added.
Specifically, Aruna lamented the inability of the Nigeria team to compete at the WYC in Slovenia despite picking one of the 32 tickets available across the world. “It is really pathetic that despite qualifying through the continental qualifiers through the financial support of meaningful individuals in the federation and for the government to now sponsor them to the world championships became an issue and how do we then improve our players if they don’t compete globally? I am really not happy with this kind of situation and I hope when the federations are getting their funds directly, they can plan themselves for this kind of events,” the 2023 African Champions said.