The minister of sports development, Senator John Owan-Enoh, has vowed to confront the former World Boxing Champion, Bash Alli, and his alleged serial blackmail over his plan to stage a Guinness World Record Boxing Championship fight in Nigeria, saying the 68-year-old boxer has thrown caution and decency to the wind.
Senator Enoh, who was reacting to a trending video and open letter to President Bola Tinubu, in which Bash Alli, a former World Boxing Federation Cruiserweight Champion, alleged that the Sports Minister demanded the sum of $1million from him in order to endorse his plan to stage a Guinness World Record Boxing Championship fight in Nigeria, said ignoring the former boxer’s sole aim of defaming and destroying his reputation will be a profound mistake.
Enoh said: “After a deep reflection, I have come to the inevitable conclusion that to ignore him will be a profound mistake. My reason for this is two fold. First, the perception in the public domain is that those in the public service are either thieves or kleptomaniacs who mindlessly pillage our Commonwealth. This assumption, no matter how widely held, is not true. Despite our challenges as a nation, there are men and women who continue to serve our country with honesty, integrity, and patriotism. I AM ONE OF SUCH. Secondly, ignoring Bash Alli and his tradition of deploying blackmail and gutter tactics now,will further embolden and enable him to continue in his usual trajectory even after I have served out my mandate as minister of Sports, without consequences.
“Gentlemen of the press, you are aware that before I was appointed to the office of Minister of Sports Development, Bash Alli had sought to mindlessly impugn the character and reputation of some of my predecessors in office, without any shred of evidence. In my own case, he has exhumed and redeployed this hydra headed monster and gone overboard because past Ministers perhaps treated him and his wild allegations with kid gloves. To simply walk away from this baloney, for me, is not an option.
“Bash Alli’s allegation that I demanded for “another 1 million dollars”as if I had received a first tranche of one million dollars from him, or perhaps any of my predecessors had done so, is a manufactured lie from the pit of hell. At no point in time did I demand for any form of gratification from Bash Alli. The questions to ask are these: One million dollars from where? If Bash Alli had one million dollars, why has he not staged his fight? His spurious allegation suffers from fatal deformity and is based on the erroneous impression that government in Nigeria is a cash cow at the mercy of public servants to pillage at will.”
According to the Minister, Bash Alli desperately wanted to meet him in his early days as Minister of Sports Development when he had hardly settled down on the job.
“In the deluge of his desperate attempts, I decided to meet him against the advice of the staff of the Ministry who were familiar with his character and antics.
“Against their advice, I decided to meet him out of respect for his age and based on the open door policy with which I am currently leading the Ministry. Conscious of the advice of some key staff of the Ministry, I sought to insolate myself and the office from any blackmail that may emanate from this meeting by making sure that my team was present at the meeting. He presented the issue of his pet project, and I told him to be patient while i get more briefing from the Ministry. All my life, the said meeting is the first and only time I ever met Bash Alli. There were no follow-ups after that one-off meeting, and I did not introduce any of my aides to him. After the said meeting, I politely refused to meet with him to this day in spite of his numerous requests and pressures.His incessant messages to me will speak to his desperation,” Senator Enoh stated.
The Minister also recalled that: “Bash Alli’s plan to stage his boxing fight in Nigeria has a long history spanning almost two decades. To achieve this personal aspiration, he has deployed all manner of strategies including naked blackmail and underhand tactics in his desperate effort to armtwist the Federal Government to spend upwards of $50m USD to stage his fight. Successive Ministers of Sports have rightly told him that his plan to stage this fight is not the responsibility of the government but a business that should be executed by the private sector.”
