Our attention has been drawn to a publication captioned “Help us, we’re owed 5 months salaries – Dakkada United Players beg Governor” with the rider “blame Sir Monty for club’s relegation” written by one Ofonime Honesty and posted on the writer’s Facebook timeline.
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A perusal cruelly exposes flaws that make it easy to decipher the ulterior motive behind it. For instance, the regular season of 2022/2023 NPFL commenced on January 15 and finished on May 21, 2023, which is exactly five months and one week, but the writer claims that the players were being owed “5 months’ salaries” for the 2022/2023 NPFL, does it mean that they were never paid a salary at all for the season? If it were true, how come the players played all matches without protest of any kind and no one ever mentioned it during the course of the season up until now?
Ordinarily, such mendacious and baseless publication should not merit any response by us or any other sane individual but because the publication is intrinsically composed to pitch a tantrum and tarnish the reputation of the immediate past Governor of Akwa Ibom State, His Excellency, Mr. Udom Emmanuel, whom, we maintain, catered to all our needs, and to set the record straight, we are compelled to respond as follows;
1. Excluding May 2023, the salaries of Dakkada United Players players and officials have completely been paid from start to finish of the 2022/2023 Nigeria Premier Football League. Vouchers to this effect are available and can be obtained at the Ministry of Youth and Sports for verification.
2. That we have extracted a commitment from the state Ministry of Youth and Sports that the salary for May 2023 will be paid in the coming days. The Ministry attributes the slight delay in payment to the transition of state administrations.
3. We are on an end-of-season break with no players currently available in camp, it is therefore improbable that any of our players could have granted the said interview as claimed by the writer.
Furthermore, every football league is designed such that teams get relegated and promoted at its end, even if all participating teams had equal access to funds. It would therefore make no logical sense to blame relegation on any individual, certainly not Sir Monday Ebong Uko, who was one of the brains behind our promotion from the NNL to the NPFL in the first place.
If the lack of funds were solely responsible for relegation, how come we were able to stay in the NPFL for four years while operating on the same budgetary allocation as we have always been allotted? What would the writer then say happened to the other three teams who got relegated at the end of the 2022/2023 NPFL, were their players not paid salaries, or were the teams deprived of funds?
Once again, we thank His Excellency, Mr. Udom Emmanuel, the immediate past Governor of Akwa Ibom state, and Sir Monday Ebong Uko, the immediate past Honourable Commissioner for Youth and Sports, for all the support that we enjoyed from both of them and we enjoin the public to disregard the said publication.
