Giwa Laughs off Amaju Pinnick-led Board N140m Claim

By Victor Iroele

The legitimate President of the Nigeria Football Federation, Ambassador Chris Giwa has described as false the figure the Amaju Pinnick board allegedly said he spent while in control of the Glasshouse .

The Pinnick board had been directed by the Ministry of Sports to retire the funds released to them for the prosecution of the 2018 World Cup, which they had been unable to do as they had different stories to tell at different times.

In a surprise twist, rather than address the issue of retiring the World Cup fund, the board alleged that Ambassador Giwa spent N140m when he held sway at the football house .

Ordinarily, we would have allowed this bare-faced lies to roll away as the facts speak for itself because the Ministry of Sports did not hand over any World Cup money to Ambassador Giwa, but we are compelled to make this rebuttal in order not to deceive the general public.

Setting the record straight, Giwa explained that all he did at the NFF was giving approvals for all the programs he met on ground, which includes the execution of the Flying Eagles game in Mauritania, which according to the budget made for it, gulped about N25 million naira, and of course, the return leg in Lagos, which had its own budget of about N30 million .

It must also be noted that it took Amb. Giwa

special intervention before flight ticket could be arranged for the Flying Eagles to travel to Mauritania because of the backlog of money being owed the traveling agency by the NFF and about N25 million was paid to the flight agency.
Giwa stressed that for the Flying Eagles game in Lagos, Nigerians will recall he paid the team backlogs of winning bonuses for the first time in a long while, which he paid from his pocket to be refunded to him by the NFF, which has not been repaid till date.

He also executed the foreign training camp of the country's U-20 women national team, the Falconets, which was looking uncertain at some point because of alleged sabotage by the same Pinnick board. The team eventually travelled to Austria, where about 50,000 US Dollars was given to them on their departure .

Giwa has further challenge the Amaju Pinnick board to come out with the break down of how he spent the N140 million they mentioned in their doctored documents, while advising the board to be circumspect in dragging his name into all their failings.