SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

shal­iza.has­sanali@guardian.co.tt

Sports Min­is­ter Sham­fa Cud­joe yes­ter­day de­scribed as “rude” moves by Na­tion­al Gov­ern­ing Bod­ies (NG­Bs) which have been re­fus­ing to sub­mit on time their fi­nan­cials, bud­gets and sched­ules for ath­letes to be processed by the min­istry for re­gion­al qual­i­fiers and in­ter­na­tion­al games.

Cud­joe raised the is­sue dur­ing her con­tri­bu­tion to the bud­get de­bate in Par­lia­ment yes­ter­day.

In rolling out the min­istry’s 2019 sport­ing plans, projects and poli­cies, Min­is­ter Cud­joe proud­ly boast­ed that the Peo­ple’s Na­tion­al Move­ment (PNM) Gov­ern­ment had dis­trib­uted over $5.2 mil­lion to ath­letes for their crown­ing ac­com­plish­ments in the sport­ing are­na.

“It is very im­por­tant for me to place on the record and to re­mind NG­Bs (Na­tion­al Gov­ern­ing Bod­ies) that it is crit­i­cal that they com­ply with the rules and guide­lines of the Min­istry of Sport and Youth Af­fairs, as it re­lates to sub­mit­ting their fi­nan­cial, their sched­ules, their cal­en­dar of events and so on, so that these ap­pli­ca­tions could be processed and we could re­al­ly fa­cil­i­tate this ini­tia­tive of pro­vid­ing them with the nec­es­sary sup­port to at­tend these re­gion­al qual­i­fiers and in­ter­na­tion­al games.”

She said it was un­for­tu­nate that a num­ber of NG­Bs over the years have adopt­ed a prac­tice of sub­mit­ting their nec­es­sary doc­u­men­ta­tion days be­fore they trav­el to re­ceive fund­ing, ex­pect­ing the min­istry to come up with the mon­ey and place it in their hands.

Cud­joe said she ob­served all kinds of "tac­tics" on Face­book videos, par­ents writ­ing let­ters to me­dia re­lease be­ing is­sued when fund­ing was not giv­en on time, stat­ing that such a prac­tice was un­ac­cept­able

“It must be stopped. It is un­fair. It is un­eth­i­cal. It is self­ish and I want to al­so say Madame Speak­er… it is rude.”

The min­is­ter ex­plained that when a sport­ing en­ti­ty comes in the mid­dle of the fis­cal year, the min­istry has to make a de­ci­sion to put on the back burn­er an en­ti­ty that would have sub­mit­ted its pa­per works since the be­gin­ning of the fis­cal year for which they would have al­ready bud­get­ed.

“So when you wait two weeks be­fore the time to trav­el to now sub­mit a doc­u­ment and then cry in the me­dia… it puts us in a very un­for­tu­nate po­si­tion. I want to re­mind NBGs to sub­mit their doc­u­ments on time.”

Last month the Min­istry of Sports was called up­on at the last minute to fund the na­tion­al women's vol­ley­ball team par­tic­i­pa­tion to the FIVB World Cham­pi­onship which con­clud­ed in Japan last week and the se­nior women's foot­ball team which is cur­rent­ly en­gaged in the CON­CACAG Qual­i­fies for the 2019 FI­FA Wold Cup in France.

Cud­joe said in the month of Au­gust the min­istry to­geth­er with SporTT wrote to over 50 NBGs ask­ing them to sub­mit their doc­u­ments and bud­gets in a time­ly fash­ion, but un­for­tu­nate­ly “un­der ten NBGs would have re­spond­ed.”