SportsBusiness: 54 Nigerian athletes owed N44.38m as Sports Ministry triples wages

Nigeria’s Sports Ministry has tripled the wages of athletes who represent the country in international competitions, including the Olympics.

The Minister of Youth and Sports, Sunday Dare, revealed that the tripling of the athletes’ remuneration was to meet with global standards.

Dare also revealed that his ministry still owed 54 athletes a total of $108,000 (about N44.38m) in bonuses and remunerations, and that it was due to the increase in pay.

Speaking to State House Correspondents on Thursday at the weekly ministerial briefing organized by the Presidential Communications team in Abuja, the Minister said the move was a historic one.

“For the first time in a long time, we have decided to triple the bonuses for our athletes. We tripled their bonuses too,” said Dare.

Read Also: SportsBusiness: In historic move, Nigerian Govt injects N80bn into sports development

“We also moved away from just giving them naira to giving them dollars because when you check other countries and what they pay their athletes, they pay in dollars.

“The Paralympians who won 10 medals, less than eight weeks after they returned, we paid them a bonus of $15,000 for gold, $10,000 for silver and $7,500 for bronze.

“We still have a few outstanding we have a balance of $2,000 to pay to about 54 athletes. And that’s because I increased their allowances from $3,500 to $6,000 at the Olympics.

“So, we had to rework our budgets and we are almost there. As we speak $4,000 has been paid to all of them. The $2,000 will be available soon.”

Ripples Nigeria earlier reported that te Ministry of Sports was to get N80 billion for the development of sports in the countey over a period of 4 years – 2021-2025.

The fund was from Nigeria’s National Development Plan (NDP), which harped on the legal and regulatory framework needed to drive Sports as business.

Join the conversation

Opinions

Support Ripples Nigeria, hold up solutions journalism

Balanced, fearless journalism driven by data comes at huge financial costs.

As a media platform, we hold leadership accountable and will not trade the right to press freedom and free speech for a piece of cake.

If you like what we do, and are ready to uphold solutions journalism, kindly donate to the Ripples Nigeria cause.

Your support would help to ensure that citizens and institutions continue to have free access to credible and reliable information for societal development.

Donate Now