Mismanaged $100,000, wasted N50m, wants N15m more

Ndanusa...failed in the NOC again

*Can’t pay staffers for four months!

My investigations have revealed that the Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC) got the sum of N50m from the National Sports Commission (NSC) without letting the NSC know that they got a $100,000 grant from the International Olympic Committee (IOC) to prepare the nation’s athletes for the London 2012 Games.

How and who got the $100,000? This is one question the NOC goons have refused to officially respond to when an e-mail was sent to them. They told their ‘friends’ that the IOC has held the money back. A new big lie. I also know that the money got into the country nine months ago and had been withdrawn from the NOC account. Let them deny and I will make more facts available.

Sources with the NOC secretariat claimed that a balance of N15m has been requested from the NSC for certain costs to be cleared. Can someone please ask how did they spent the first N50m given to them by the NSC?

Why are they so callous and self-centred that they could not pay their staffers? The staffers are being owed for four long months as if they don’t have bills to pick nor have mouths to feed in their families.

Ordinarily, the curse and pains felt by these staffers is enough to spiritually hinder whatever the nation had deserved in the Olympics assuming we had prepared well.

These are signatures of the fact that our sports institution as a whole had collapsed. It is not about the reform the minister can bring to bear. How did acute failures get to repeat terms in the sports federations. These known failures get promoted to manage the NOC. Yet, we were waiting for miracles. Miracles don’t just happen. Yet, these same people are aspiring to be returned to manage the federations for another four years. Rio is promising to be a bigger and better failure than London if these goons still smuggle their ways to the Board of the federations.

This is a sad story of a bad fortune. Some years back we had the likes of Alhaji Raheem Adejumo as President of the Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC) who led a team of selfless Nigerians and were in the habit of funding a lot of the activities of the National Sports Commission (NSC).

Today, the NOC has almost become a parastatal of the NSC where the latter funds the activities of the former. What a sad twist of fate. The giver is now a beggar. We have an NOC that does not and cannot secure one big spender in the Organised Private Sector (OPS). They are waiting for President Goodluck Jonathan to order the members of the OPS to compulsorily drop into their pocket.