By Dele Oje, Lagos
Chairman, Board of Trustees of the Professional Footballers Association of Nigeria, Harrison Jalla has appealed to President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to constitute a board for the National Sports Commission (NSC) in order to give it legal backing.
Speaking to journalists in Lagos, he said that the act establishing the commission stipulates that 17 members will constitute the board, noting that the present situation where only two people are calling the shot in the commission amounts to illegality.
“You cannot operate the NSC in a vacuum, because doing so will be going contrary to the act establishing it. The act says that 17 members will constitute the board of the commission which means that anything they’re doing now has no force of law.
“When you look at the act establishing the commission, you’ll discover that even the Director-General of the National Institute For Sports (NIS) is a board member of the commission, PFAN is also a member and the private sector have two members.
“The act also stipulates that leadership of state sports commissions should be on the board by rotation and each of the geopolitical zones will also have to serve two years on the board. So, you cannot run the commission without a properly constituted board.
“There is no where in the world where a commission is in place without a board. Even in Nigeria of today, all commissions have properly constituted boards and that of sports cannot be an exemption because doing so amounts to illegality”, noted Jalla who is a major stakeholder in Nigerian football.
Jalla said that he expected the Chairman of the National Sports Commission, Mallam Shehu Dikko to have advised Mr. President on the need to constitute the board, positing that it’s not too late to do the needful.
“The chairman of the commission was appointed in October last year and I had expected him being a seasoned sports administrator to have advised the President on this matter.
“The implication of not having a board is that there are certain amount of money they cannot spend because if they do that, it might result to another crisis entirely because two people cannot just sit down and be taking decisions on our sports sector”, he concluded.
