Solomon Dalung: Sports has developed culture of resistance to change
IV The Minister of Youth and Sports, Barrister Solomon Dalung in this no holds barred interview with SHOT! said the sports sector in Nigeria has developed the culture of resistance to change which he said is responsible for the dearth of sporting faciliti
For close to two years now, you have presided over sports in Nigeria. What have been the challenges? Well, the sports ministry and the sports sector is a very interesting component of the Nigerian socio-political system. The sports ministry is a service oriented ministry, meaning that it is a ministry that does not generate money. It only spends money. Government and the private sector world over invest heavily in sports because sports is a national asset. It is a unifying factor. So I can understand why Nigerians have interest in sports. The challenges basically have been that the sector over the years has developed the culture of resistance to change. We have a serious challenge of lack of modern sporting facilities. Even those ones that were hitherto first class, are today in dilapidated state. It has made access to facilities for participation in sports difficult and there are no investments going on in the sector to augment those facilities or to rehabilitate them. This is a very big challenge. Today there is no budgetary commitment to sports. If you take the 2016 budget of sports, we were going for Olympics in an Olympics year and the budgetary allocation was N250m and the least we needed was N2.b. That was quite discouraging.
In view of the challenges you have just enumerated, would you say you have recorded any achievements?
So far so good, we have records of our performance that of course I can beat my chest and say we have made history. There are so many things that have happened under our watch that we can say this is the first time it is happening. For the first time in the history of Nigeria, we went to Zambia and defeated them in Lusaka. For the first time we are running a World Cup campaign without a Presidential Task Force and we are topping our group. In the past we had Presidential Task Force with a budget of billions, but here we are running the same without a team but having desirable results. We have for the first time a black man becoming a world champion in scrabble. We can also talk about the Paralympics that set the African records. We might not have done wonderfully but from the background we have come from, we have cause to beat our chest to say we have done well.
World over sports is driven by the private sector. What have you done to attract corporate sponsorship for sports in Nigeria?
When I had the challenges of funding, I decided to embark on consultation and I met broadly with so many private sector investors in sports. I wanted to know why they had disengaged or why they are not doing significant investments in sports. I got so many reasons from them from their experiences. But I can summarise it this way that the governance structure is very very important in building investors’ confidence. That is why we decided to democratise the national federations elections. We introduced a transparent process of assuming leadership. Now such leadership would also be very very transparent and accountable to the people who brought it into existence. And in doing that it would earn the confidence of the investors. Everything is going to be done openly. Again the background of what happened in the past where the board of a federation was elected by only 13, this year we opened it up and extended it to 54 delegates with every state producing one or two delegates. So at the end of the day we have leadership now that is a representational. Their watch word would be accountability, transparency, honesty, fairness and justice. The second thing is that the federations must be autonomous. If the federations continue to fly on the wings of government, they would be so protected and would lack the initiative to do something. It is time they become autonomous. It is time they get incorporated with the Corporate Affairs Commission so that their activities can be open to public scrutiny. Their books of accounts must be made properly so you can walk into the secretariat of a federation and open their book of account and you can say they received so and so intervention from A B C and they received so and so foreign grants and this is how they utilized the funds. If you are interested in investing, you have been convinced by their books of account. So we have set an agenda of engaging the private sector through a very transparent process.
You want to woo investors by putting in place federations that would exhibit transparency and accountability, but how transparent were the recently held elections? There have been allegations of manipulations and favouritism.
If you conduct an election and there are no complaints, then you must go back and look at it very well. Was it an election held here on earth, or is the election for angles?. So if human beings are involved, definitely you will have complaints. But again your ability to guarantee the credibility of the process is to put forth an effective mechanism to ventilate the grievances and we have the Appeals Committee which is looking at all the grievances associated with the elections. Those that are genuine will be attended to and justice will be done and those ones that lack merit would be dismissed. The appeals committee is made up of very credible people who will be able to take us to the next level.
There are so many complaints but the one that stands out clearly is the confusion PHOTO: in the basketball federation where two elections were held in different venues. What is the position of the ministry on the NBBF election?
The issue of basketball is unfortunate that the dissolved leadership of the federation allowed itself to be used to that level. Once you have served like in his own case for eight years as president, I think his commitment and passion should be to work and develop the system and not to destroy it. He was part of the process from the beginning to the end. The last meeting we held together with NOC, he was the very one who suggested the issue of revisiting the guidelines and extending the tenure from two terms to three terms in order to accommodate experience. As a leader, I saw wisdom in it and we all agreed. What they wanted which they didn’t get was shortly after the meeting, they brought a proposal that I should extend their tenure by six months. And that was when I suspected foul play because if they had got the extension of tenure from two terms to three and still brought forward a proposal to extend the tenure of the executive to six months, then it means there is deliberate intention to undermine the electoral process and I acted swiftly. The second issue is NOC and the ministry supervised the electoral process. If anybody had held any election anywhere were those two bodies there? If they were not there, can we still be saying there was an election? Is it possible to hold election without INEC?. So it is the same thing. INEC is the supervisory body and any political party that wants it congress to be valid, INEC must be there. NOC and the ministry were not in Kano. We were even not told there was going to be any election anywhere. So I think maybe somebody gathered with his friends, entertained themselves. They were either dinning or breaking fast in Kano.
From what you have just said the ministry has recognised the basketball federation election that took place in Abuja even as it did not comply fully with the electoral guidelines. Instead of the national stadium, it held in a hotel in Abuja under the cover of darkness.
The electoral committee of every federation having been briefed had the powers to conduct an election and it took into consideration its convenience looking at the number of delegates that moved into Abuja. I least expected it was going to be like that. It was like a trade fair. So many people were involved and hotels were fully booked. So it was the electoral committee in its wisdom that decided where to hold its election and the validity of that election will depend on whether those who were supposed to be there were at the venue and the answer is yes. NOC was there, the ministry was there so there was an election in Abuja. However, if these two were not there, then even if the election took place in Aso Rock, it would have been invalid.
The challenges basically have been that the sector over the years has developed the culture of resistance to change