BONA misplaced P700K
Officials reckon that money is not stolen but unaccounted for instead Close to a P1 million unanswered for due to poor management
It is now common knowledge that the long suffering Botswana Netball Association ( BONA) has been plagued by embarrassing financial woes that have halted progress of the association since 2017. However, there is renewed hope as recently re- elected President, Malebo RaditladiNkgakile believes a new era has dawned at the association. Nevertheless , the new BONA executive committee has to address P700 000 in misplaced funds. The money has gone unaccounted for since 2018. According to a document recently leaked to BG Sport, the association has spent thousands of Pula on national team preparations, travels, senior team kit, officials’ attire and transportation of players, but all those items are yet to be accounted for as the spending was not registered in black and white. “To tell the honest truth as per the admin audit report, we have not been doing our filing and records right in the past, people would retire and the office proceduraly will go to the BNSC without filing any copies at BONA,” Raditladi- Nkgakile conceded.
“We don’t blame them because there was no BONA audit before and they would not be worried because they knew documents would not be needed again anywhere.” Furthermore, she says there has been changes to address the problem that has been rocking the association for a long time,“so we have now introduced the new procedures that we will still have to be inducted on and later share with our members. This is expected to educate us all on financial procedure towards better administration and management.” Raditladi- Nkgakile said funds have not been misused but rather records were not made, “the office would surely struggle to get the accurate information as the filing was not right, we have several names that are appearing, not to say they misused any funds but because records were not kept.” In 2019, BONA missed a deadline to submit an audited financial report for the 2017 Netball World Youth Cup, which the country hosted. The report was to be submitted before the 2019 Netball World Cup held in Liverpool last July, the country thus missed out on competing at the World Cup due to failure to submit an audited financial report.
According to the document, the expenses of the African Qualifiers in Zambia cost P86 720; the qualifiers were held in August 2018, while the national team training camp in July the same year cost P79 012 and the Bona Diamond challenge in December cost P50 912.