THE history of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), which runs African football and in particular the African Cup of Nations, reads like the history of many African nations since independence 60-odd years ago.
Its outgoing president, Issa Hayatou, a Cameroonian, finally bowed out following a shock defeat in a vote in the African Union (AU) in Addis Ababa on March 16th.
He had clung to power for almost three decades. This is nearly as long as Paul Biya, a friend of the Hayatou family and Cameroon’s president, who has been in charge since 1982.
CAF has had five presidents since it was established in 1957, the same number as Ivory Coast, one of the continent’s footballing powerhouses, over the same period.
This was the only the third time Mr Hayatou had been challenged. On the two previous occasions, in 2000 and 2004, he won thumping victories. In 2015 he successfully scrapped CAF’s age limits, allowing himself to run again at the age of 69.
This followed earlier changes to the organisation’s electoral rules designed to neutralise opposition. “He thought he was invincible,” says Manase Chiweshe, an expert on African football from Zimbabwe. Mr Hayatou’s friendship with Sepp Blatter, the disgraced former president of FIFA, the international football body, always helped. But this time he lacked the support of Gianni Infantino, its current president.
African football grew much more prosperous on Mr Hayatou’s watch, thanks to lucrative sponsorship deals and the sale of television rights to global broadcasters. But critics have long wondered where all the money went.
Much of the continent’s footballing infrastructure is old and shoddy, as a short drive from the AU offices in Addis Ababa, the capital of Ethiopia, to the decrepit national stadium illustrates. Cash barely reaches the grassroots.
National federations are reliant on FIFA rather than the CAF for financial support—and that support, under FIFA’s statutes of non-interference, is suspended if a national government should dare to intervene in football matters, even to tackle corruption.
CAF’s incoming president, Ahmad Ahmad (pictured above), says he wants to clear out the rot. He also wants to provide annual grants for national federations, which would be a first.
But the former chief of the Madagascar Football Association will have his work cut out. Football and politics are close partners in Africa.
Take the Democratic Republic of Congo, where the country’s most influential opposition leader is also the owner of the continent’s most successful football team, TP Mazembe. Or Cameroon, where for 50 years a member of the Hayatou clan had a seat in every national government. Mr Ahmad’s campaign manager, Philip Chiyangwa, is a wealthy Zimbabwean politician who entered the game as recently as 2015. He and his boss, also a former politician, won support by promising federation presidents business-class flights. “It is a new era,” smiles the president of South Sudan Football Association, Chabur Goc Alei—who was suspended by its board last year for alleged financial impropriety, until FIFA intervened to get him reinstated.