Keir Radnedge
CAF presidential elections
Shakira belted out: “This time for Africa!” from the opening match at the 2010 World Cup through to the final. It was, briefly, but not any more.
Sepp Blatter, then FIFA’s president, bore a missionary’s obsession with bringing the complex continent up to speed on and off the pitch through football. That was one of Blatter’s better ideas and he saw the World Cup as the means to open the door.
Political shenanigans had seen the 2006 finals sent to Germany so the 2010 award was restricted, with South Africa outbidding Morocco and Egypt. FIFA threw means and money at the project, and its success owed much to the night-and-day efforts of secretarygeneral Jerome Valcke (now, like Blatter, on the naughty step).
Bear in mind, the IOC has never dared take the Olympic Games to Africa at all.
Back in 2010 South Africa was alone among the African nations equipped to stage and support the finals. But that was a tournament with “only” 32 teams. No African nation could host the 48-team brainchild of current FIFA boss Gianni Infantino, and it is impossible to envisage any two or three or four neighbours sinking regional rivalries to co-host.
The sad truth is that the World Cup finals will not be heading back to Africa any time in the foreseeable future. Morocco may continue to extend its record of unsuccessful bids but Asia will have hosted the finals twice (Qatar in 2022 and, probably, China in 2034) before any further calendar gaps open up.
Logistics and international football politics are two barriers. A third is the confused state of African football itself – the administration, that is, not the players. Directors and officials, who failed consistently to put their own houses in order, have betrayed the wonderful footballers that Africa has sent out into the world game.
Of course, it’s easy to point a finger of blame at individuals. Good and bad apples are running football in Europe, Asia and the Americas. It’s just that bad apples have inflicted the greatest disease upon the body politic of African football and within CAF.
World Cup performance is a handy, if simplistic, guide to progress and then stasis. I witnessed Zaire’s nine-goal collapse against Yugoslavia in West Germany in 1974 but then, later, Cameroon’s overturning of defending champions Argentina in 1990, Senegal’s matching defeat of France in 2002 and the penalties pyrotechnics of Ghana’s 2010 quarter-final against Uruguay.
More than 1,000 African footballers populate leagues across Europe with the likes of Mo Salah and Sadio Mane international icons at the top of the English Premier League alone. The conundrum is that the more young Africans are drawn abroad the more impoverished the leagues they leave behind.
In 2019, Infantino grew so frustrated with CAF that he sent in his Senegalese secretary-general Fatma Samoura as a one-woman “normalisation committee”. She reclaimed centralised control over World Cup TV rights and trimmed back the executive committee’s per diems cash culture. But the longer she stayed the more she was resented and resisted.
Samoura fled back to Zurich last year, coincidentally just before the COVID pandemic brought international and most national sport juddering to a bankruptcy-threatening standstill.
There are no easy answers. Perhaps even no answers at all. But effective leadership from and within CAF should be a start.
The 54 full member associations of CAF can shortly pull the leadership
Directors and officials have betrayed the wonderful footballers that Africa has sent out into the world game
back on course. On March 12 in Rabat, Morocco, CAF will stage its presidential election. This will be African football’s most important ballot in a generation after decades of corruption and cronyism.
CAF has had only six presidents: Abdel Aziz Salem (Egypt, 1957-58), Abdel Aziz Moustafa (Egypt, 1958-68), Abdel Halim Muhammad (Sudan, 1968-72), Ydnekatchew Tessema (Ethiopia, 1972-87), Issa Hayatou (Cameroon, 1988-2017) and, since 2017, Ahmad Ahmad from Madagascar.
Ahmad emerged from virtually nowhere four years ago to end Hayatou’s reign with behind-the-scenes support from Infantino. Ahmad promised competition upgrades, administrative reform and financial transparency but has created only dirt and derision. A FIFA ethics investigation and five-year ban – pending appeal – should prevent him standing for re-election.
The investigation followed charges that Ahmad, allegedly, paid $20,000 in bribes to various FA presidents, that he inappropriately axed an equipment contract with Puma in favour of a little-known French company named Tactical Steel and that he over-spent $400,000 on cars in Egypt and Madagascar. He was also accused of harassing four female members of the CAF staff. Ahmad has denied it all.
So this is the scenario surrounding the leadership of African football. That is without even delving into erratically-organised national associations and leagues where lack of funds, vote-rigging and match-fixing are exacerbated by the plundering of talent by greedy agents selling youngsters the European dream before abandoning them to their fate.
The task of leading CAF into a brave, new era was tough enough before COVID. Now it is infinitely more challenging.
Four men believe they can do a better job than beleaguered Ahmad: Jacques Anouma (Ivory Coast), Augustin Senghor (Senegal), Patrice Motsepe (South Africa) and Ahmed Yahya (Mauritania).
Anouma is an old hand at CAF and FIFA politics. The 69-year-old has played a major role in local politics and business (Air France and Renault) and was a CAF delegate to the FIFA exco-turnedcouncil from 2006 to 2015. Along the way a first bid for the presidency in 2013 was blocked when a worried Hayatou changed the eligibility rules.
Senghor is president of the Senegalese federation but it’s unlikely he is being encouraged by compatriot Samoura on behalf of Infantino. In any case, he has been on the CAF executive committee for less than a year. Northern neighbour Yahya, from Mauritania, might be worth watching though. He was the FFRIM’s national teams director then general secretary before becoming president in 2011. Either man might seek to fashion a self-seeking regional deal ahead of the vote. But, Motsepe is definitely the most intriguing of the quartet.
The South African mining mogul is one of the richest men on the continent with Forbes reporting his personal worth as $2.1 billion. He is being promoted by SAFA president Danny Jordaan who knows all about the snakes and ladders of African football politics.
Motsepe did not help his image last January when he told US President Donald Trump that Africa loved him. Motsepe cosied up to Trump during the World Economic Forum in Davos. Critics attacked his assumption of the right to speak on behalf of Africa as a whole.
The owner of Mamelodi Sundowns claims the support of influential Nigeria, Botswana and Sierra Leone but faces an uphill battle, for all his millions: no-one from Anglophone Africa has ever headed CAF. The Arab-speaking and Francophone lobbies have always wielded far superior influence in the corridors of power. This time around Anouma, Senghor and Yahya will probably negotiate the path for a single Arab/Francophone candidate before election day.
Still, all four challengers for Ahmad’s crown have time to press their case, drum up and count the promises before realism cuts in. The outcome may be important for the world game, but it’s crucial for CAF. As Shakira sang:
You’re on the front line Everyone’s watching
You know it’s serious
We’re getting closer
This isn’t over
The pressure’s on,
You feel it . . .
This time for Africa!