“I want to sincerely appeal to President Bola Tinubu to increase the budgetary provision for sports development even though the 2024 sports budget has been signed into law, particularly now that 2024 has a lot of local and international sporting events across the globe.”
President of Nigeria Volleyball Federation, Engineer Musa Nimrod, makes a yearly call by federations on the Federal Government to do more for sports.
For a country working on passing a sports bill that will professionalize sports, the 2024 sports budget is far from its ambition.
Nigeria Sports Industry Bill: A Talk and No Walk Yet.
According to its promoters, the National Sports Industry Bill carries the seed that will turn sports from recreation into a business contributing to the national gross domestic product.
Currently, sports contribute less than %1 to the country’s GDP, but it has maintained a negligible growth trajectory since 2019.
Nigerian Sports is under the leisure and recreation sector, and in 2019, 2020, and 2021, respectively, contributed 0.19, 0.31, and 0.33 percent to Nigeria’s GDP.
The Nigerian federal government is proposing N31.24bn, representing less than 0.11% of the total budget, with N20bn going for capital projects in 2024.
President Tinubu, upon assumption of office, split the hitherto Youth and sports ministry into two, making sports a single ministry in August 2023.
Meanwhile, the N31.24 budget will service the sports ministry, its headquarters agencies, the National Institute for Sports, and the Nigerian Football Federation.
To grow properly, sports require infrastructure for elite and grassroots athletes to develop.
Furthermore, 123 projects covering 87 ongoing and 36 new projects are on offer in the budget, and a breakdown offers a gloomy future for the development of Nigerian sports.
2024 Sports Budget: The Never-Ending High-Performance Center
Costing N3bn in 2014, the high-performance center in Abuja is supposed to have been completed.
Housing a 48-room hostel and a sports medicine department, with nothing else in place, the HPC features in the 2024 budget as ongoing.
As currently designed, the HPC is a white elephant project that takes more than it gives.
Also, it’s a design error looking at the project’s location compared to others.
The High-Performance-Center at the University of Port Harcourt serves similar purposes but belongs to the Confederation of African Athletics.
Unlike the HPC in Port Harcourt, the Abuja center lacks the facilities and equipment to thrive.
Elsewhere, featuring in the sports budget are different mini-stadiums without attention to comparative advantage for each location.
Other items on the sports budget are more random than deliberate.
2024 Sports Budget: Anti-Doping Breakthrough?
With a showdown with the World Anti-doping Agency on the horizon, Nigeria is building a lab worth 300 million at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, and will be spending Forty-five million on testing athletes with another Fifty million for Anti-Doping in sports in 2024.
Meanwhile, Nigeria awaits the verdict of the Court of Arbitration for Sport, CAS, on the non-compliance case.
Finally, the Nigerian sports budget must focus more on developing a sports economy, starting with the heavy-lifting job of providing facilities and making it attractive for private businesses to join.