Gleanings from the findings of Parliament’s probe into NCS
IVAN OJAKOL
What you need to know:
The report also details that many of these Federations did not account for the funds that had previously been disbursed to them, but NCS still continued to disburse funds to them.
Parliament instituted a select committee to inquire into the operations of the National Council of Sports (NCS) towards the end of 2022. The committee submitted its report a month or so ago with some damning findings. I recently got a chance to read the report in-depth and today’s article is more or less a report of my gleanings from it.
Besides what has appeared mostly in the press-the NCS General Secretary being asked to personally refund monies and the fights between certain Federation heads and the General Secretary, there are other findings and recommendations from the report that, if acted upon, will go a long way in creating a different trajectory for sports in Uganda.
Even with Parliament’s appropriation of a total sum of approximately Uganda Shillings 48 billion to sports, NCS received the funds not only late but also in tranches. This of course affected both NCS’ and the Federations’ activities and plans, pointing to the need for serious political will from the government towards sports. The environment in which sports functions matters in determining its success.
In line with the committee’s terms of reference, the sticky subject of “priority sports” came up. NCS attempted to define this term by stating that sports, where Uganda has a comparative advantage, are given “priority” in terms of funding. According to the report, the NCS General Secretary stated that this is done through resolutions. however, when tasked to provide evidence of the same, NCS could not. The committee recommended that the Ministry of Education and Sports comes up with policy guidelines regarding these priority sports in order to counter possible abuse by NCS. Unfortunately, the sports law awaiting presidential assent does not go into these murky waters of defining priority sports, but hopefully perhaps through the discretionary powers accorded to the Minister of Sports to make Regulations, they can address this divisive subject. As has been variously highlighted in the media, even with priority sports, there were still major discrepancies and inconsistencies in the disbursements from NCS to them.
Controversially in my view, the committee recommended that government explores the possibility of disbursing funds directly to Federations. The better option would be streamlining the operations of NCS, cleaning it up, and empowering it to achieve its roles as provided for in the NCS Act, 1964, or even in the impending sports law.
The committee made an interesting but contradictory observation as far as I am concerned. There were allegations from some federations that NCS asked them to account for more than had they received which according to the report was backed up by the “Auditor General’s special audit on the releases made by NCS to Uganda Boxing Federation”, the same committee in the same breath then turned around and said that there was insufficient evidence to substantiate this allegation.
The report also details that many of these Federations did not account for the funds that had previously been disbursed to them, but NCS still continued to disburse funds to them.
The lack of technical incompetence and voluntariness of those at the helm of the running of these Federations, and even the lack of offices for some of them was highlighted. The lack of technical competence is best captured by the fact that as the report highlighted, the inability of some Federations to come up with proper work plans and budgets. Interestingly, as the committee noted NCS still disbursed funds to these “briefcase” Federations/Associations.
That committee did a fantastic job and many of the recommendations of that select committee should be followed through seriously.
In all of this, however, a few questions linger in my mind; how far do Parliament’s oversight powers go? A statutory body, NCS is given money by the government under its mandate as the overseer of sports in the country, and it is under that mandate that it can disburse monies to different sports disciplines as it deems fit, can Parliament then dictate how NCS should disburse that money? Doesn’t that erode NCS’ independence? Yes, in this case, there are allegations of abuse of discretionary powers by NCS, but what if there were not?
Ojakol is a Sports Lawyer, Partner at Matrix Advocates, and Law Lecturer at IUEA
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