02 Jul 2018

Botswana Football Association (BFA) does not audit sources of funds for sponsors of football.

Instead, Assistant Minister of Youth Empowerment, Sport and Culture Development Mr Dikgang Makgalemele said due diligence was exercised before an agreement with a sponsor is confirmed.

Responding to a question in Parliament from MP for Gaborone North Mr Haskins Nkaigwa, he said that individual teams are also expected to do the same.

Mr Makgalemele said under the current Club licensing regime, all 16 Premier League Club members were required to audit their books of accounts through accounting firms accredited with Botswana Institute of Chartered Accounting (BICA) in order to be licensed to participate in league activities.

He said that auditing activities do not  just apply to teams that have managed to attract sponsorship from the business community.

Mr Makgalemele said the requirement by Confederation of African Football (CAF) for clubs to submit audited books of accounts as part of club licensing was only enforced in the 2017/18 season, therefore any prior auditing would have been done by individual clubs and kept by them.

In this regard, he said that the BFA does not have any records of audits of the different teams.

All Premier League teams, he said, were audited during the just-ended 2017/18 season as part of the club licensing requirements.

He said the teams had to engage BICA-accredited firms to audit their books of accounts, citing that out of the 16 teams, only 5 were fully compliant.

These teams are Township Rollers, Orapa United, Jwaneng Galaxy, Police XI and Security Systems.

He noted that the rest of the teams did not audit their books as expected and were thus given provisional licensing while they were in the process of putting their books in order.

Mr Makgalemele said eventually all the teams had their books audited and they were found to be in order.

The same process, he said would be extended to the National First Division during the 2018/19 season.

Member of Parliament for Gaborone North Mr Haskins Nkaigwa had asked the minister to state if there were any audits done by BFA on sponsors of local football with regards to their source of funds for sponsorship and if so, to state the names of the sponsors whose sources of funds have been audited for the past five years.

Mr Nkaigwa also wanted to know if the football teams attracting sponsorship from the business community were audited and which teams have been audited for the past five years including the findings. ENDS