232news
By Allieu Bockarie
Senegal hosts this year’s Zone 2 Boxing tournament in Dakar. Senegal won the bid to host in Sierra Leone after the last regional tournament in Sierra Leone. In this year’s tournament the participating countries were expected to arrive on the 6th and the 7th March 2023 with boxing tournament to start today. According to Alhaji Komba, the Secretary General of the Boxing Association, they presented a budget to the NSA Board for the tournament few month before the competition kicked-off. He went on that since then they had been waiting for NSA to call them for a discussion on the budget but they never did. The Boxing association instead paid for one of the boxers who arrived in Senegal few days ago with neither a coach nor a medical person. Before the date of departure the association took a cross section of boxers with different weight categories to a training camp in Bo. Komba said it will be very disheartening to miss the regional tournament as it is part of the Olympic Games qualification. Besides, he said this will discourage most of the boxers who have used all their energies to train only to be told at the end there is no money to pay for them. In response to their claim, the NSA Board have said the problem is with the Finance Ministry as they have long since presented the budget to the Finance Ministry for approval and they are still waiting for the Finance Ministry to approve the budget. Besides boxing, the NSA board said they have also presented similar budgets for other sports to the Finance Ministry awaiting for approval. They went on that they have already spent the quarterly funds that was disbursed into their account and they are waiting for the other quarterly disbursement from the Finance Ministry.
