BY JUDE OPERA, Abuja
Former players and coaches of premier league side, Nasarawa United yesterday besieged the headquarters of the Nigeria Football Federation (NFF) over alleged unpaid wages by the management of the club.
Former captain and leader of the team, Stephen Moga told journalists that most of them are being owed several years of arrears which he said had condemned most of them to begging for survival.
Moga said although only about seven of them were able to travel to Abuja to present their case to the Arbitration committee of the NFF, more than 15 of them are being owed different amounts of money running into several millions of naira.
Moga who claimed the club was owing him N8.4 million naira covering 2008 and 2012, said that most of the affected players are owed between 2 million to 10 million naira.
According to him, the debt rose so high because the management kept promising them that they were sourcing for money from the state government but regretted that when they got the hint that the government had given them the money, nothing was paid to them.
“They were promising that they will pay sign-on fees because they were talking to the government so we believed them, not knowing that they were lying to us.
“We also heard that government actually released some money to them. Let me say that they are also owing our coaches too. They owe each of them 10.9 million, not to talk of the players.”
Speaking in the vein, former play-maker of defunct BCC Lions of Gboko, Sylvester Ekuja who is now a coach said the money owed him by the club is N6.4 million naira boasting that he signed a valid contract with the team and that he has submitted all the documents to the NFF.
According to him, management threatened to sack when they began to agitate for the backlog of their salaries and wages.
Reports of Nigerian clubs owing players and coaches years of unpaid wages are rampant and often times when they try to demand for their due, they are threatened with sack,; one strong reason any good player in Nigeria wants to venture abroad.