Plateau United, Suffering from Polytics

Until the Nigerian Football League is cleansed and sanctified of dirty politics, local and international effort aimed at improving the standard of the league will continue to yield no satisfactory outcome. Politics and sports are practically immiscible as the mix breeds a scanrio where the worst is presented as the best.

Victor Wikadson, the team coach of Plateau United says his team has been a victim of these dirty games. The team has been playing in the professional division one for the past four seasons. In all the seasons the last few matches ruined the early efforts of the team and making it impossible for it to gain promotion to the premiership rung of the league.

Kadiri Ikana and his side kick who helped Kano pillars to win the 2007/2008 premiership season in Nigeria has left the club. The same thing happened with Ocean Boys coach after winning the FA cup. In both cases the coaches left in dissatisfaction after they were told that the cash of the club owners won the league and not their efforts. This prompted the Kano pillar’s coach to publicly complain of max fixing, leading to the inauguration of the Dominic Oneaya Committee to investigate the matter. Wikadson who seems to concur with Ikana says each time they lost the struggle for promotion at a critical moment it was a club owned by a member of the NFL that beat them to it. The open secret is that those board members of the NFL use their positions to pass instructions to referees as to who should win a given match.

If politics must come into football it should not be the raw type politics that used to usher councilors into local government council and so on. People who campaigned for Jang have often gone to him to say “bend down low let me tell you what I know”. When Jang comes close they will whisper “those men at the helm of Plateau United are not doing well and any money given to them will amount to waste”. The political gossipers also works hand to able to complicate red tape administrations a practice that made it impossible for the team to pay sign-on fees for the past two seasons,. This sometimes leads to an ebbed miracle in the camp. Then there are clubs like Kano Pillars and Ocean boys who take the cash to NFL and haggle for the title.