By Daily Sports Nigeria on July 14, 2025

Former president of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria, Dan Ngerem, has launched a scathing critique of the structure of the re-established National Sports Commission, calling its current setup without a full board a dangerous anomaly that undermines accountability and corporate confidence, The PUNCH reports.

Speaking in a wide-ranging interview with M4S TV, Ngerem described the current composition of the commission, consisting only of a chairman and director general, as a glaring failure of governance, especially in an institution that oversees billions of naira.

“It’s an aberration that you can have two people running a National Sports Commission without a board,” Ngerem said.

“It’s like running a major corporation with billions of naira, a multi-million dollar corporation, without a board.”

According to him, the commission’s failure to install a board comprised of individuals with corporate governance expertise reflects a broader culture of opacity, inefficiency and lack of accountability that has plagued Nigerian sports administration for decades.

 “You’ve got to have a board. You have to have principled people with corporate experience to direct the affairs of the National Sports Commission,” he stated.

“We all fought for it. Various committees, mine, for example, chaired by General Isola Williams, we all fought for it. Now that it is here, why do you have the chairman and the DG and nobody else?”

Ngerem warned that this leadership vacuum is one of the primary reasons private sector actors and high-net-worth individuals continue to shy away from investing in Nigerian sports development.

“When you walk up and say, ‘I’m chairman of NSC’, they ask you, ‘Where is your board?’ You don’t have a board? I’m not going to deal with you,” he explained.

“There’s no corporate governance, there’s no international best practices, and in such an atmosphere of inaction and lack of anything really, there will be no accountability.”

He stressed that the absence of a functioning board not only undermines transparency but also creates an environment where financial misuse is more likely to occur, particularly during international events.

“Fundamentally, as they are putting together that National Sports Commission, the board should be there to account. You don’t leave the executives alone to run roughshod over a multi-billion dollar concept,” Ngerem said.

“Whoever put together the structure, there’s an intrinsic architecture for the National Sports Commission that is imprimatur in all the documents. Like I said, Ogbemudia Report, the one I served in, name it, it’s there. Why would you not have a board to oversee fundamentally what you’re doing?”

Source Punch Ng

Posted July 14, 2025

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