Uganda Boxing Federation (UBF) President Moses Muhangi is back again with his words of criticism this time round attacking and accusing National Council of Sports (NCS) for being in “bed” with sports association that don’t match the legal requirements to be national associations.

Sometime last year, the UBF boss hit hard to National Council of Sports of what he said was unfair allocation of financial support to the National associations.

The out spoken boxing federation head has now come up with a detailed release through which he has out lined that a big fraction of sports associations are simply brief case federations that lack structures and that they don’t have activities across the country as required by the law.

“The main mandate of NCS is to regulate all sports associations and activities according to the 1964 Act of Parliament; however they are a lot of quarries on how the process of recognition of sports associations has been handled,” Muhangi cried out loud.

In his write-up, Muhangi highlighted some of the key points of reference necessary for fully operational associations as presence on the ground, functional structures, coverage across the country, competitions through the year among others and according to him, many of the recognized associations by NCS lack some of these pillars.

He writes:

“Ideally, a given sport must first exist, have functioning structures, be present on ground, have a certain percentage of the country’s geographical coverage, have participants, functional leagues or games, etc and on the basis of that such a sport could get a recognition certificate from NCS.”

He adds:

“That sport then goes on to function business as usual and in the event that there is need for that Federation to come up with a select team that can represent Uganda in international games, then NCS would hence come in to support that team to the scheduled games. After the games are done, irrespective of the outcome then that sports leadership can then ask government to further support it financially to further develop the sport or to support its other development programs. That is how Federations should relate with NCS but here is a scenario where someone sits on a computer and writes a few documents here and there and then submits them to NCS for recognition and immediately after the sports federation gets recognition. After that recognition, then such an association starts saying that government is not supporting us to develop our sports, or government should do this or do that for surely an association that is thin or non-existent on ground. It also comes out as if there is a scheme for people to register briefcase Federation to target government funds.”

Muhangi goes ahead to question the visibility of such associations because many of them don’t have physical locations of operations (offices); don’t have competitions and lack grass root structures or operations like community academies or activities in schools.

On visibility he writes:

“On the lists of the federations currently registered or recognized by NCS, there are Federations that have no address, no games, no presence, not visible on ground, not in schools, etc. Maybe they existed in the past or they were never existed; save for their listings on paper. When you masquerade into a music concert and they find you without an entrance tag they will kick you out. So it is important that NCS does immediate stock taking, head count, physical roll call of all these federations before some things are done or debates embarked on” he concludes.

However, NCS through its General Secretary, Dr. Patrick Bernard Ogwel reacted by asking the boxing federation head to help NCS by giving more details to his exclaim.

“Let him (Muhangi) define these ghost federations. What does the word ghost mean? As NCS, we verify and make follow ups before issuing operational licenses and certificates to all the sports federations. There stringent measures undertaken and strict monitoring of all the sports federations’ operations.”

According to the NCS data base, Uganda has 51 sports associations / federations and all are active and functional according to the current Sports Act through which they are regulated by NCS.