The Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) is cringing under the full impact of the cut in its monthly subvention by the Ministry of Sports to settle outstanding debt.
The Glass House is entitled to N150 million per month as grant for its recurrent and football related activities. But THISDAY checks revealed last night that in the past three months, the federation ‘s allocation has been drastically pegged to N60 million, a 60 percent cut of its monthly vote.
It is understood that the shortfall is set aside at the end of every month to indemnify creditors. Sports Minister Solomon Dalung has directly been disbursing the allocation of NFF following the scrapping of the National Sports Commission (NSC).
THISDAY learnt that Dalung has adopted the First Line Charge approach by first debiting the NFF’s account to offset outstanding debts before remitting the balance.
Such is the size of NFF’s liability that it is on record that the national teams are indebted to hotel operators aside the backlog of unpaid salaries, allowances that are owed to coaches and players. Recently, the National-U23 team was thrown out of its hotel in Abuja because of failure of football officials to settle a N7 million debt.
It was to address the cash squeeze that informed the recent decision by NFF Technical Committee to place all national teams’ assistant coaches and technical staff on part-time employment only when there is a national assignment, a departure from the old order where they were appointed of full time arrangement.