Lux September
From working at KICK OFF to a new life as the head of the CAF media office, Lux September has seen plenty in his journey through football.
Chinese philosopher Lao-Tzu once said, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with one step” and, among South African football administrators, Luxolo September perfectly epitomises this adage. The former PSL administrator has left local shores to take up a senior position within the Confederation of African Football (CAF), and KICK OFF’s Chad Kelly-Klate caught up with him upon his arrival in Cairo to discuss this trailblazing move. KICK OFF: Lux, congratulations on your appointment at the Confederation of African Football! Luxolo September: Thank you so much. Before we get into more on that, how and where did football start for you?
Not just football, I’m lucky that I come from the Eastern Cape, which is an area where you are exposed to many different sports, like cricket, rugby, football and swimming. I was talented as an athlete, I was a very good sprinter – 100m and 200m. I represented Border; I went on to represent Eastern Cape and so forth, but I was lazy and I didn’t like it, even though I was talented in it. I never trained. During the week, I would rather be on a cricket or soccer field, or swimming, instead of being on an athletics track and practicing.
You even passed through the doors of KICK OFF at one stage?
Ja, I once had a stint and did some work for KICK OFF, and I owe a lot of my big break to [former editor] Richard Maguire. The reason I got a permanent job at the Dispatch is because someone had whispered in their ear that KICK OFF was interested in my services, so they offered me a permanent role and not even a junior role when I was doing my second year in varsity. So, KICK OFF is a special place for me and I owe them a lot for my first big salary. While I was at the
Dispatch, I was asked by KICK OFF to do match reports for Bush Bucks, who were still based in Mthatha. I used to get paid R50 to go and cover their games, and to go to Mthatha [from East London] was R40, so my profit was always R10. But I didn’t mind because it was learning period for me.
At some point you also served at FIFA – can you summarise that role and experience?
I got fired! I went from being at the peak, winning awards and so forth, to actually being fired from the Dispatch...
“BEING FIRED WAS THE BEST THING THAT EVER HAPPENED TO ME.”
How did this happen?
The issue was that I felt – I think these things still happen in the newsroom today – the injustice whereby there was a lot of inequality in how people were being treated and, as a 22-year-old, I was speaking out about these issues that were affecting older people. I was asked to apologise, which I refused to do because it was a matter of principle for me, and ... I didn’t really get fired, I mean it’s just a [simple way of putting it], but I was asked to leave. I’m glad I never apologised because being fired was the best thing that ever happened to me. Had I not been fired at the Dispatch, I would have never joined FIFA or the PSL, or even CAF today.
Wow. Yes, back to the FIFA gig ...
The FIFA thing, which was my first big break in sport administration, came when I was a team manager/co-owner of an amateur side in East London at the time, so I was actually already running football in one way or the other, in one of the small leagues there. Out of nowhere FIFA called ... I don’t know how. I was flying from East London, going to Jo’burg, and as I land, I get this strange call; I answer the phone and on the other end is someone from Zurich, I had never received a call from someone in Europe in my entire life. They say, ‘Hi, I’m so-and-so from FIFA, would you like this job?’ I was like, ‘You’re mad!’ I thought it
was a prank call, but they said, ‘OK, send your CV.’ I said, ‘I don’t have a CV’, and the person starts laughing and says, ‘OK, I’ll give you my email address’. I typed this CV and sent it, and within 10 minutes an email comes back and it looked legit, with a few other people copied in. Long story short, two weeks later I had a job at FIFA. I never knew anyone there, I never met a single person from FIFA in my life, and I never even dreamt of working for FIFA.
So, what was the experience at FIFA like and what did you do? Were you working remotely?
No, I spent a lot of time that side as well and close to 2010 I was in South Africa quite a lot, for obvious reasons. I worked in the Corporate Communications division and in the New Media office. FIFA was like a university for me. It opened my eyes to a world that I never knew existed. The first six months there were just a living hell. I went from being an award-winning journalist, who was praised by everyone for being thought of as a wonderkid, to being a nobody and a beginner all of a sudden – it stripped me of everything I thought I knew. The first year was a period of unlearning for me, and back then it was not very fashionable to have an African working for them, so it was the most difficult, but also the most amazing period of my life. I learnt so much about the business of football, which prepared me for my time at the PSL and now this time at CAF.
And how did you end up back at the PSL?
I had been at FIFA for a good few years, and at some stage Altaaf Kazi [former PSL media and PR manager] and I had become good acquaintances and we had been exchanging a lot of ideas. He dropped the idea of me joining the PSL, and at first I wasn’t really interested in it and then I heard Dr [Irvin] Khoza speaking at the Brand Africa conference, and I was like [taken aback]. I was then the one who called Altaaf afterwards and said, ‘Hey, are you still keen on that gig?’ And I resigned at FIFA actually, which is the most stupid thing I could do according to a lot of people at the time, but the rest is history. It was a huge gamble to leave FIFA and join the PSL in 2012. It was the right decision but the most difficult at the time.
Why is that?
Because everyone would want to work at FIFA. Here’s this boy, in his 20s, who had a big break to join FIFA at 22-23, and a couple of years later he’s mad and leaves. My former boss said to me, ‘Dude, you’re either stupid or mad’. I just said, ‘Let’s take our chances’ [laughs]. But I’m glad I did. I think I realised that at FIFA, I’m just a number, but if I come back to Africa and implement everything I learnt at this university then I’d make a real difference in African football. Even that time, I had a passion for pan-Africanism, the thinking of us being proud of who we are and how we can develop ourselves and our own things. At FIFA, I saw this was not rocket science – you need to be organised, you need to have structure and all these other things. So the opportunity to come back to the PSL for me was an opportunity to drive an African ideology. The PSL was not a job for me, I didn’t come for money. I made less money there, but I came for an ideology and nothing else.
Looking back now, did you have any regrets?
Look, there were days where I asked myself, ‘ Was it the right decision?’ But I got to work with my heroes – Dr Khoza, Jomo Sono, Kaizer Motaung, and all those people. I mean, my only dream when I was growing up was to watch the Soweto Derby live … that was my only dream in life. Now I got, not just to watch the Soweto Derby live but to work at the Soweto Derby and with Dr Khoza on a daily basis. These were no longer my dreams; these were other people’s dreams. My whole life in the last 14 years has not been about living my own dream – I fulfilled my dream when watched the Soweto Derby ive, and that was the end of the s story – but there were people who dreamed of working at the PSL, with Dr Khoza and to shake his hand, with Sepp Blatter and shake his hand, work at CAF... Now, I believe I’m now living other people’s dreams and that is why this journey is a bit heavy. All the things I’ve done are based on the purpose that I think I have, and football to me is the only thing owned by African people. We don’t own anything else in South Africa, only football. So, of course it makes sense for us to guard the only thing we own jealously and protect it with everything we have.
What’s it like working with the Chairman then, particularly on media matters?
STRESS [laughs]. He’s the most difficult person I know. He’s an unbelievable individual though. He has the world of knowledge. He’s a perfectionist. You think he doesn’t read anything, but you can send him a thick document at night and the following morning he knows every page there, he can quiz you about it. He calls you at 6.30am and says, ‘Did you watch the bulletin on Morning Live, did you check what they are saying about the league?’ That’s the kind of person he is, he keeps you on your toes, and it has been an unbelievable learning experience for me just to follow his footsteps and sit on his shoulders. Because he has foresight, and he has a good understanding. I think in South Africa, people don’t appreciate Dr Irvin Khoza.
Go on...
“KICK OFF IS A SPECIAL PLACE FOR ME AND I OWE THEM A LOT FOR MY FIRST BIG SALARY.”
Before the Gauteng bio-bubble, when football was stopped, football faced the real possibility of extinction – it could have died. He was at the [PSL] office from Monday to Sunday. I felt bad because, I mean, I wanted to work from home, but I thought, I can’t. Here’s this man, at his age, he’s here every day and you could see he was taking strain. I’m privileged to now be at CAF but I have benefited from the legacies of Dr Khoza, Dr [Molefe] Oliphant, Dr Danny Jordaan – these are the three pioneers,
really, in our era. All these three men I have a lot of respect for, because they ploughed so that I can walk here today.
So, how difficult was it to leave this all behind for greener pastures?
It was the most nerve-wrecking thing. When I got the call [from CAF], my first thought was, ‘How am I going to tell Dr Khoza that I’m leaving?’ Because when I got offered this job, it was no brainer for me, really, to accept it. But now I was thinking to myself, with the kind of relationship I have with Dr Khoza, how will I tell him that I’m leaving? I think the most difficult part for me was literally sitting across the table from him and telling him, ‘I’m done.’ Looking at his facial expression just broke my heart, but with time he understood what I wanted to achieve, not for myself but for our continent, to move from serving 52-million people in South Africa to serving billions of people across 54 countries in Africa. You must also remember that there’s been no-one from South Africa to serve in a senior role at CAF, so in a way they are giving me an opportunity to be a pathfinder for other administrators coming after me, who are going to reshape and create a different Africa. It was an honour to work for Dr Khoza. I’ve left the PSL but I’ve not left his ideology, which I will carry with me.
What was your biggest take-out during your time at the League?
I learnt a lot about the football industry, first of all. I learnt how to deal with people a lot and I had some very, very stressful moments. I mean, the job is a 24-hour job, you don’t sleep and you don’t have a holiday. But it’s also about people’s emotions, you’ve got to find a certain balance in working, especially with the media guys, who are very emotional and strong, opinionated people. So you’ve got to mix carrot and stick, you can’t just be stick, stick, stick, because you can’t just use steel without generosity and you can’t be generous without using a bit of steel. My biggest mission at the PSL was to change the single story, because the danger with the single story is that it creates stereotypes – it makes something one thing and one thing only. It created football to be this game of corrupt and poor people, and so forth. I’m not saying this is true or not, but there are many faces of football. The CEO at SuperSport or Multichoice is a football fan, the security guard there is a football fan, so we can’t have a single story. One supports Pirates, one Chippa United and the other Cape Town City, for example, but these are the people serving the same industry so to speak.
Your toughest moment during your time at the PSL?
There’s no doubt about the toughest moment – when Kaizer Chiefs played Free State Stars at Moses Mabhida Stadium [Nedbank Cup]. I didn’t sleep that night, a lot of things were going through my mind and I was thinking a lot about the industry. I got up at around 4.30am, put my phone on silent and went for a long run to clear my head, because I was just so sad. I thought to myself, ‘ We can’t destroy this industry like this. Whatever happens, we can’t destroy the industry.’ So, that particular day was the most difficult moment for me.
“HE [KHOZA] IS THE MOST DIFFICULT PERSON I KNOW. HE’S AN UNBELIEVABLE INDIVIDUAL THOUGH. HE HAS THE WORLD OF KNOWLEDGE. HE’S A PERFECTIONIST.”
ED’S NOTE: In April 2018, Free State Stars beat Kaizer Chiefs 2-0 in the Nedbank Cup semifinals. Objects were thrown and supporters stormed the field vandalizing the facilities living a few security guards injured.
Is that how big the threat of that incident was?
I think when you’re in administration, you see [things differently]. The incident itself was not as big, but when you start playing the worst case scenario in your mind – because by the time we went to bed, we didn’t know all the details of what happened. I mean, we stayed up very late, went to police station and all those things, but everything was still sketchy and there was a lot of fake news going around, if you remember. You’re sitting there, I was just nervous about everything.
Now, heading to Cairo, can you tell us a bit more about your role and what you’ve been tasked with?
I think I’ll leave that to CAF to announce and talk about it. They told me they will talk about it after the executive committee sits, or whenever they are ready.
What are you hoping to achieve going forward?
We have to rebrand Africa. We have to bring Africa back to the world stage. We have to be very intentional about promoting and positioning brand Africa. We have to tell different stories of this beautiful African continent that has suffered from the nonviolent form of occupation that makes us doubt ourselves and a consumer of everything that’s not ours; who are trapped as permanent consumers in a vicious cycle that stops us from generating anything of our own; who will destroy their leagues to promote others’ and destroy their own products to promote others’; who will never consume anything that they own, because they’ve been taught that they are inferior and not good enough. If I can make a difference in changing that perception, even if I die afterwards, then I’ll be good.