The Federal Ministry of Youth and Sports is set to refund $135,000 mistakenly paid to the country as grants by the global athletics body, International Association of Athletics Federation (IAAF).
This was made known in a telephone chat with the Technical Director of the Athletics Federation of Nigeria (AFN), Mr. Sunday Adeleye, who attended a closed-door meeting called by the Sports Minister, Solomon Dalung.
The meeting was called to seek ways to avoid possible sanctions by athletics world body, IAAF over the country’s inability to refund $135,000, to the world body.
It would be noted that the debt occurred, when the IAAF mistakenly paid $150,000 to AFN instead of the yearly $15,000 grant in 2017. The world body promptly notified they AFN of the mistake and demanded that the excess $135,000 be refunded it paid into the Treasury Single Account (TSA) of the Sports Ministry two years ago.
However, two years down the line, the AFN and the Sports Ministry had failed to refund the money, which led to suspicion that the officials in the know may have spent the money illegally.
According to Adeleye: “It was a closed-door meeting, where we discussed the pressing issue, which is the IAAF money and we talked about the preparation for All Africa Games, Olympics Tokyo 2020.