Sports Ministry’s 2018 budget cut by 30%

Following Wednesday’s reading of the 2018 Budget and Financial Statement by the Finance Minister, Ken Ofori-Atta, it has emerged that the budgetary allocation for the Ministry of Youth and Sports for the 2018 year has been cut by 30%.

In 2017, the Ministry was given a budget of GHS 46, 910, 275 for its activities.

The money was to be spent on the Compensation of Employees of the Ministry and its related departments and agencies, goods and services and capital expenditure.

The other line items on the budget were retained internally generated funds and funds from development partners.

For 2018, the Youth and Sports Ministry will have GHS 32, 799, 500 to work with for all activities and programmes.

On the sporting side, the budget stated that Ghana would be taking part in a number of international competitions such as Youth Olympics Games in Buenos Aires, Argentina from the 6th to the 18th of October, 2018.

Other activities the budget captured were the African Youth Games in Algeria and the Commonwealth Games in Australia.

The Black Stars, the Black Princesses, the Black Starlets and Black Satellites will be involved in various qualifiers for various competitions.

The devil in the details

Even though the overall budget saw a huge reduction, certain line items received more funds for 2018 as compared to 2017.

For instance, compensation of employees shot up by 14.7% taking the 2017 expenditure up from GHS 14, 377, 052 to 16, 857, 786.

Capital expenditure went upwards by 63.9% to 2, 774, 420 from the 2017 figure of GHS 1, 000, 000.

Two line items- Goods and Services and Retained Internally Generated Funds- saw massive drops in their respective allocations.

For Goods and Services, there was a whopping 145 % drop, as the 2017 allocation of GHS 30, 457, 092 went down to GHS 12, 411, 380.

The Retained Internally Generated Funds item also went down from GHS 1,076, 131 in 2017 to GHS 755, 914 representing a 42.3% percent drop.

Interestingly, the line item in relation to Development Partners’ Funds stood at zero and it was the same in 2017 raising eyebrows over whether sports is part of discussions when the government speaks to its development partners who are mostly foreign governments and agencies.

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