‘We Shall Squeeze you to the Dot’, Netball, Boxing drop out of priority sports in Uganda, budget cut from 3bn to 300M each in Space of a Year

For the past years, Netball, Football, Boxing, Athletics and basketball have been the top priority sports in the country and even their share from the sports budget has been better compared to other disciplines among the 51 federations and associations.

The just concluding financial year (2022/23), Boxing and Netball have been in a docket of receiving 3bn ring fenced funds each from the government though boxing managed to get only 133m shillings, Netball never received any in the first three quarters until the world cup preparations pressed the National Council Sports on the wall to release some money to Netball in the last quarter.

Netball and boxing have been optimistic that they will again be allocated the same amount in the 2023/24 financial year, however, their hopes were buried after the approval of the new budget by the Parliament of Uganda.

According to the article published by the local news paper (New vision) on Thursday, it has indicated that Netball and boxing are in the second category of subvention and the category have been allocated with 6bn shillings which will be shared among 16 federations and associations.

These include; Netball, boxing, badminton,chess, cycling, golf, handball, hockey, kickboxing,pool, squash rackets, swimming, table tennis, tennis, volleyball, and woodball.

If these sixteen federations and associations by any chance are to get equal share, that means Netball will be getting 375 million shillings a year and 93.5 million shillings per quarter, the same to boxing and other 14 federations.

To the current regime, this might be not a shock to them because since they took over in June 2021, they have been not getting government support but their activities have been running and been getting their support from partners and sponsors, the likes of Plascon Uganda, GoTV Uganda, Uganda Airlines and others.

Its not so clear why the Parliament that allocated 3bn to Netball in last financial year, slashed their budget to 375m in less than a year and yet the sport is one of the best performing on continent and the world at large.