Hoopers blast Kida, decry boycott

Rivers Hoopers basketball club of Port Harcourt players have taken a swipe on Musa Kida for stopping them from participating in the ongoing Kwese Premier Basketball League Final 8 holding at the Indoor Gym of the Sani Abacha Stadium in Kano.

Captain of the team, Bob-Manuel Ngowari who said the Port Harcourt club was aiming for a place on the continent blamed Musa Kida for killing their dreams of representing Nigeria at the African club championship for the two qualifiers from the competition maintaining that they would have qualified having prepared for the task.

Speaking in Port Harcourt Ngowari described Musa Kida as a man playing politics with their career and means of livelihood of Port Harcourt-born players while describing his antics against them as unfortunate.

“It is unfortunate that we are not participating in the Final 8 after coming second in Atlantic Conference 6 and preparing well for the Final 8. We knew we stand a chance of qualifying to play at the continent and have worked very hard but cannot understand why the Musa Kida-led board should say we should boycott the Final 8 and go and stay at home without any meaningful plans for us. We heard Musa Kida is the chairman of Rivers State Basketball Association but we don’t know him and have never seen him around us doing anything for us. Where was he when we had challenges of salaries, owed backlog of allowances when we fought hard to qualify in the 2011 and 2012 season without salaries?

“We did not see him, neither did he come to our aid. If he claims he has our interest at heart we would have been seeing him around us. What has he done to help Rivers Hoopers all along? Now that we have an opportunity to reap from our labour and better our lives he is destroying us. It is really sad,” he stated.