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.
Ikenna Agu
Head of Media
