Sunday Dare, Minister of Youth and Sports, disclosed that his Ministry has raised its remuneration for athletes representing the country in major global tournaments, including the Olympics.
This comes as he stated that the ministry still owes a total of N44.37m in incentives and remunerations to 54 sportsmen.
Dare revealed these to State House Correspondents on Thursday at the Presidential Villa at the weekly ministerial briefing held by the Presidential Communications team.
The minister said “For the first time in a long time, we have decided to triple the bonuses for our athletes. We tripled their bonuses too.
“We also moved away from just giving them naira to giving them dollars because when you check other countries and what they pay their athletes, they pay in dollars.
“The Paralympians who won 10 medals, less than eight weeks after they returned, we paid them a bonus of $15,000 for gold, $10,000 for silver and $7,500 for bronze.
“We still have a few outstanding we have a balance of $2,000 to pay to about 54 athletes. And that’s because I increased their allowances from $3,500 to $6,000 at the Olympics. So, we had to rework our budgets and we are almost there. As we speak $4,000 has been paid to all of them. The $2,000 will be available soon.”
