Min­is­ter of Sports and Com­mu­ni­ty De­vel­op­ment Sham­fa Cud­joe has said her gov­ern­ment’s fo­cus right now is not to try and clear or re­pay any debt of the T&T Foot­ball As­so­ci­a­tion.

Cud­joe in an in­ter­view on the I95.5FM Sports Pro­gramme with An­dre Bap­tiste on Sat­ur­day made it clear that any mon­ey that will be put out by her gov­ern­ment for foot­ball, will be for the de­vel­op­ment and up­grade of the ath­letes. The gov­ern­ment last year, al­so took a very firm po­si­tion to not as­sist the Unit­ed TTFA un­der William Wal­lace in its fight to pre­vent the FI­FA-ap­point­ed Nor­mal­i­sa­tion Com­mit­tee from re­plac­ing it as man­agers of the sport in T&T.

Then Cud­joe had said that if the nor­mal­iza­tion com­mit­tee was com­ing to clear the ex­ist­ing debt, then it should be al­lowed, as her gov­ern­ment was strapped for cash.

The COVID-19 pan­dem­ic has sought to make sit­u­a­tions worse for sports and fund­ing, but the in­abil­i­ty of the nor­mal­iza­tion com­mit­tee to clear the ex­ist­ing debt to date has cre­at­ed lit­tle con­cern for the min­is­ter.

She gave the as­sur­ance the Sport Com­pa­ny of T&T (SporTT) has been work­ing along­side the TTFA and FI­FA to come up with a plan to en­sure the liq­ui­da­tion of a debt of $98.5 mil­lion which was re­leased to the pub­lic by the nor­mal­i­sa­tion com­mit­tee, fol­low­ing an au­dit by Ernest and Young (EY) re­cent­ly.

The debt did not sur­prise Cud­joe, but she said she awaits the pro­pos­al com­ing to her desk from SporTT and the TTFA/NC to see how good it will be and what she plans to do.

“There are many lessons to be learnt from this TTFA ex­pe­ri­ence for oth­er NG­Bs, that re­lates to prop­er lead­er­ship, ac­count­abil­i­ty, trans­paren­cy, prop­er man­age­ment and so on be­cause this prob­lem with the TTFA did not start to­day, yes­ter­day or even two or five years ago, so there’s a lot of work to be done.

Rome was not built in a day, so TTFA has some sig­nif­i­cant work to be done. I don’t want to pre-empt the ac­tion or the pro­pos­al or the dis­cus­sions they are hav­ing with FI­FA.

I know they’re work­ing on some sort of plan, so un­til I see their fi­nal plan or the dif­fer­ent op­tions they are con­sid­er­ing, I can’t say how good it is just yet.”

Cud­joe al­so had some ad­vice for the em­bat­tled foot­ball as­so­ci­a­tion, while com­mend­ing peo­ple like Robert Hadad, chair­man of the nor­mal­iza­tion com­mit­tee, and oth­ers who have been work­ing dili­gent­ly on what has to be done to bring the sport back to a po­si­tion of nor­mal­cy.

“TTFA needs to meet with all the dif­fer­ent bod­ies, the dif­fer­ent arms and units. No one group can do this alone, and of course, there is still a lot of is­sues still boil­ing and bub­bling in the foot­ball fra­ter­ni­ty in T&T.

For them to make any sig­nif­i­cant leap for­ward, con­ver­sa­tions must take place and they must try and unite to at least get foot­ball back to some sort of nor­mal­cy. So, I com­mend those who are work­ing dili­gent­ly right now, and are try­ing to get that kind of work done, Hadad and his team at the TTFA to Dou­glas Ca­ma­cho and his team at the SporTT, as well as all oth­er stake­hold­ers.”

On­ly last week the nor­mal­iza­tion com­mit­tee re­vealed that Ernest and Young (EY) will al­so work with them to de­vise a prop­er plan to clear the ex­ist­ing debt.