While the federal football league struggled through years of crises, officials fed fat on its available funds

While the Nigeria Premier League suffered from constant bickering and perennial lack of funds to run its operations, officials made sure they steal as much as possible of the little funds available to the league while owing clubs and offering shambolic organisation for Nigeria’s local league, a recently released audit report of the NPL has revealed.
Officials routinely lament that the league is grossly underfunded, but as they do so, they also made it a point to allocate to themselves huge sums of money despite claims of the league’s insolvency, the external audit of the league’s management for year ended June 30, 2012, says..
To hold an annual congress, the NPL’s board solicited and got financial assistance. Critical projects are suspended due to paucity of funds while staff are owed bonuses. Yet officials live large, paying themselves outrageous emoluments and retaining large, expensive apartments in our capital city,
After exhausting the goodwill of the league’s bankers with unresolved loans, the board’s directors went obtaining credit wherever one was available. A huge chunk of the loan are spent on frivolous, unaccountable purposes, the document revealed.
Once, the league officials took loans from an unregistered microcredit firm, auditors say, and at another time, they borrowed up up to N5.4 million from an individual under questionable terms.
The audit report’s verdict was damning: As officials hypocritically complained of frustrating shortage of funds to run the league well, they made sure there was more than enough funds to service their lavish lifestyles, even as the league snake through one crisis to another.

The audit

The review, carried out by Olaniyi Wale Odunaiya and Co., and submitted to the Premier League in September 2012, documents abuses that unfolded at the NPL within one financial year up to June 2012, but provides a portrait of a trend that seems to have lasted years.
The report accuses the NPL officials of pocketing millions of naira belonging to the league, and cornering some through fronts while subverting regulatory procedures, and doing nothing to block excesses.
For seasons, the report says, the NPL officials operated a board that consistently returned losses and indebtedness, and failed to move beyond insolvency.
Yet, defying economic sense, and stipulated regulations limiting perks to only moments of robust financial standing, the board members, as they wished, paid millions to themselves as allowances, took and repaid loans records and maintained luxury accommodation in Abuja.
Former chairman of the board, Davidson Owumi, who was removed in controversial circumstances in December 2010, repeatedly got loans whose deployments could not be justified, the auditors said. Once he got a N15 million donation from the Bayelsa State Government, but remitted only N10 million.
Besides enjoying self-allocated monthly imprest (an advance or a loan of funds) of N300 thousand, Mr. Owumi paid “financial assistance” to himself totaling at least N1.7 million.
The amount, accumulated in tranches of N200 thousands, N300 thousands, was no loan. It was not meant to be repaid, it was just to “assist” the chairman, the report says.
His vice chairman, Shehu Gusau, at the time, paid N1.2 million to himself as car maintenance allowance in less than one year.
“The risk is that the chairman uses his position on the board to selfishly use the company’s funds to run private life without considering the financial health of the company,” the report noted on the “financial assistance’ to the chairman.

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