It’s weeping and gnashing of teeth in the circle of some members of the Edo State contingent to the last National Sports Festival in Abeokuta, Ogun State as the fiesta has made them poorer not minding the extra effort they put into ensuring that the state came out as one of the best at the games.
Information reaching this news desk is that the aggrieved Edo State contingent members are suffering shock treatment as their achievements in ensuring that the state emerge as one of the top performers at the fiesta has not been rewarded in appreciable proportion by the state government in line with the many promises that were made to them by through the State Sports Commission that they will be well catered for as per payment of daily allowances for the 14 days that the games will last plus a promise that additional huge sums of money would be given to medal winners at the games.
All these were just discussions fuelled by the fertile imagination of the sports administrators who obviously were scheming underground on what would be their next move.
Insiders told this publication that the sign of the evil scheme against the members of the contingent started showing up when the Sports Commission management refused to pay them their allowances as earlier promised.
“What came to our rescue was that Governor Monday Okpebholo gave us our salaries as we were departing for Abeokuta for the fiesta. If not for that most of us would have become victims of starvation and this would have seriously affected our performance.
“Now, the fiesta has ended and we have brought glory to our dear state but what we’re getting in return is a show of ingratitude by the Sports Commission officials. We were only able to get a week’s payment out of the two weeks payment that we were promised after we exposed some of the things going on.
“And also the payment didn’t go round as a whole lot of people were denied payment. The half payment was even actually made to some select members of the contingent,” a source divulged.
Going further, the source disclosed that “things are now made worst as the Chairman of the Sports Commission, Desmond Enabulele, has left the shores of Nigeria to meet up with members of his family who are overseas and nobody knows when he will be returning to the country.
“The excuse that the ‘cabal’ defending the Sports Commission’s inadequacies are giving us is that there is paucity of funds from Governor Monday Okpebholo who is allegedly not happy with our fifth position ranking at the games which he said is the poorest outing of the state at the Sports Festival in recent times.”
Another member of the contingent took it up from there, “we made a terrible error which will not happen again as some other states were using juicy offers to lure us to come and represent them but which we turned down in our vow to make Edo proud. See what is happening to us now.”
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