The Broadcasting Organisation of Nigeria (BON) has cried out about the perceived and alleged conspiracy of Caf agents handling the TV rights for the competition.
The Chairman of BON Abubakar Jijiwa disclosed in Abuja on Wednesday that they were doing everything humanly possible to ensure the logjam is resolved for Nigerians to watch the Eagles live from South Africa.
“We have been talking (with Caf representatives) since October last year and have made efforts at reaching a conclusive solution as regards the matter. We have looked at our market and made an offer of $1.2 million to JCM-African Sports Consulting via a letter dated November 1st, 2012 which they rejected.
“We went further and upped our money to $1.5 million through our letter with reference BON/ES/Vol.III/12/27 to Mr. Jean-Claude Meyer of African Sports Consulting and that too was rejected. They are sticking to € 8 million but we said € 8 million is not acceptable by us because we cannot market such a massive sum of money and we will have a heavy loss at the end of the day,” the BON boss disclosed.He also explained that BON received an e-mail dated December 5th, 2012 from LC2 directing BON to negotiate with CFOOT Limited and BON replied through a letter dated December 12th, 2012 with reference BON/ES/Vol.III/12/48 offering 41 million for all the 32 matches as well as $300,000 for selected matches. But Jijiwa said all these were rejected by CFOOT in a letter dated December 21st, 2012.
The BON boss said the CFOOT on January 4th, 2013 came up with an offer of € 8 million for the total package (32 matches) but BON responded to CFOOT’s letter reiterating their earlier offer of $300,000 for the selected matches.
“So what we are suggesting to them now is that they should give us selected matches involving Nigeria including the opening ceremony and the closing ceremony of the 2013 AFCON, and the quarter-finals, semi-finals and final matches of the competition at $300,000.
“So we have only a week to market this sum of money since the tournament is just about 10 days away. We don’t have the luxury of time to go on advertisement drive and the global melt down has also affected most of these industries now and they are cutting all their expenses including advertisement of their products and services,” Jijiwa disclosed in Abuja.
The BON boss lamented that there are some unpatriotic Nigerians who have joined some cartels to milk the nation on this matter.
“This people think Nigeria is a fat cow that they could milk dry. So we detest this shylock attitude and we cannot subscribe to it and it is not acceptable”
