COUNCIL, FAM CLASH OVER GATE TAKINGS

The Malawi National Council of Sports and FAM are embroiled in a conflict over gate collections for the 2015 Afcon home tie against Algeria as well as tomorrow’s match against Mali.

The Football Association of Malawi (FAM), which is battling to raise funds to enable the Flames to complete the Afcon campaign, held on to government and council shares for the Algeria game. The association’s president Walter Nyamilandu said the arrangement will be the same in tomorrow’s match.

The game against Algeria grossed about K13 million (about $30 000) and FAM announced recently that it is targeting K10 million (about $20 000) from tomorrow’s match.

“Having failed to get more supplementary funding from our traditional sponsors, government, plans are to utilise all gate takings and all stakeholders understand the dire situation in which we are,” said Nyamilandu.

But council executive secretary George Jana on Thursday faulted FAM for ‘grabbing’ other stakeholders’ shares.

“You don’t get money from the source, what they did was wrong. In principles of accounting, that is a serious audit query.

“They are supposed to surrender the shares to stakeholders and ask for the money as a donation and not to dictate,” said Jana.

Nyamilandu described council’s position as unfortunate.

“Is the implication that they [council] do not want the team to travel to Ethiopia? We expect them to be the first to understand our plight. If there are issues, we can sort them out later.

“It is needless for council to be pulling us down or frustrating our efforts to generate the much-needed revenue,” said Nyamilandu.

Director of sports in the Ministry of Youth and Sports Jameson Ndalama said he was not aware of the issue.

“But if they did not surrender government’s share then it is improper because government assists them all the time,” said Ndalama.

Government gets 25 percent ground levy while council pockets five percent.