- Says subvention declaration of sports ministry was delayed
- Iterates new funding criteria
Botswana National Sports Commission (BNSC) is yet to make its annual grants to National Sports Associations (NSAs) for the 2022/23 financial year mainly because its subvention declaration from the ministry responsible for sports was delayed, The Business Weekly Sports has established.
“Our grant was only recently declared and we are now in the process of adjusting our budget, including allocations to NSAs,” the CEO of BNSC, Tuelo Serufho, said in response to a The Business Weekly Sports question. “We are targeting to complete the exercise by end of this month (May) and should have declared the NSA grants by the end of the first week of June.”
The delay has affected the running of critical programmes at some NSAs for lack of money. “We have a big event like the Chess Olympiad coming up in July that needs the backing of our mother body but we are yet to get our grant for 2022-2023 financial year and that may affect our preparations for the tournament,” said the Secretary General of Botswana Chess Federation in an interview.
At Botswana Boxing Association, the Secretary General Taolo Tlouetsile said they have stopped their tournaments because they do not have money to fund them. “And the inactivity is going to affect our boxers’ momentum and fitness ahead of major competitions like the Commonwealth Games,” Tlouetsile said. “Our aim was to use the tournaments to prepare for the Games in the absence of a training camp.”
Meanwhile, in an previous interview Serufho said the BNSC had adopted a new criteria for allocating grants to NSAs. NSAs are now scored against criteria derived from the BNSC Vision 2028 and the National Vision 2036 in which the more an NSA scores against the criteria, the higher its ranking and funding. According to the new criteria, football and athletics are classified as high impact sporting codes and therefore receive more funding than other codes. “We are now funding for this purpose,” Serufho noted then. “We are investing in associations that are helping us to drive the goals of the nation and that of the BNSC.”
