International Baseball
Federation, IBAF, has given Nigeria Baseball and Softball Association (NBSA) up
to May 15th, 2013 to re-confirm paticipation or withdraw in
with ignominy from the forthcoming Baseball World for 12-Under holding
in Chinese, Taipei in July
2013.
National Sports Commission has recently turned down the full/partial
sponsorship
of the children national team as requested by the Nigeria Baseball and
Softball
Association citing financial and logistic problems.
However the fund approved for the National Sports
Commission in this year's budget by the National Assembly shows that it has N3.2
billion
for sporting activities alone under which international campaign of this
nature
should fall, yet the request for the children baseball players that will
be
representing Africa are a token sum of N6 million for purchase of flight
tickets
for players and officials.
The implication of Nigeria
withdrawal from the World Cup could be severe taking into consideration that
Nigeria is the only African country expected to feature in the bi-annual
championship.
The Secretary General of the
Association, Kehinde Laniyan, has expressed sadness on the plight of the game
in the country adding that it was quite unfortunate that other sports were not
getting fair attention even from the budget approved by the National Assembly
for the NSC for sports development and promotion.
He called on the current
Minister of Sports, Mallam Bolaji Abdullahi, to look inwards and help other sports to
grow stating that he will write his name in gold if he deviates from the norms of only giving
attention to football which previous Sports Ministers were known for.
He regretted that the Ministry
could not provide the team with N6m to participate in the championship saying
that all efforts to get the Commission to listen to them have been frustrated
by the bureaucratic bottleneck in the Ministry.
“What we need is just N6m, and
it’s unfortunate that we have been turned down by NSC and with the situation of
things, it’s fast becoming clear that Nigeria will fall under the hammer of
IBAF due to our absence” he said.
It would be recalled that
baseball has been played in Nigeria for more than 20 years with minimal
government support.
Significantly, baseball has
given Nigeria more medals in the All African Games than many sports in the
country.
0 comments:
Speak up your mind
Tell us what you're thinking... !