African football needs radical change – fast!

Osasu Obayiuwana, the former BBC journalist and currently Associate Editor of the London-based NewAfrican magazine (www.africasia.com) and a football producer/programme maker with SuperSport, the pan-African sports TV channel, has written a frank piece on the current state of African football, syndicated in the Saturday 5th March editions of The Guardian, Complete Sports and the Daily Trust newspapers, which have the furthest reach in Nigeria, Africa's most populous country of 150 million people.

The piece is replicated below.

African football needs radical change – fast!

By Osasu Obayiuwana

My romance with football – as a journalist and broadcaster – began 24 years ago. It is truly amazing how swiftly the bird of time can fly.

Every dream and ambition I had as a “wet-eared” football journalist has been realised – I’ve covered World Cups and several international tournaments, great African and European club matches, had enlightening conversations with the game’s elite players and officials, as well as having a platform to put my views across to a global audience.

But the game brings me little joy in these troubled times, as the stench of ineptitude, inertia and nepotism, particularly in the African game, puts me – and many of us that deeply care about its future – in a state of despondence and militancy.

The guardians of our game – the Confederation of African Football (CAF) and its 53 member national associations across the continent (South Sudan will become CAF’s 54th member, after its formal commencement as a sovereign state in July) – are frighteningly unaware, or unconcerned, about the precarious state our game is in and an urgent need to chart a course that will halt our rapid decline.

While there’s no question that the 2010 World Cup finals, organised by South Africa, was a resounding success and a credit to the skills of the Local Organising Committee, led by CEO Danny Jordaan, Africa’s performance on the pitch was pathetic.

Five out of our six representatives – Algeria, Cameroon, Cote D’Ivoire, Nigeria and South Africa – fell at the first hurdle, with Ghana’s Black Stars bearing, creditably, the onerous burden of saving Africa from total shame.

With that in mind, I assumed CAF’s 33rd Ordinary General Assembly in Khartoum, Sudan – the birthplace of CAF in 1957 – would provide the perfect forum for the continent’s football mandarins to take an unvarnished, brutally honest look at where we are and what we must do to clean up our mess. The World Cup finals is the benchmark by which the quality of the national and continental game is measured. And on that score, we’re failing miserably.

African football has not moved a single inch beyond the quarter-final Rubicon, crossed by Cameroon’s Indomitable Lions at the 1990 World Cup finals in Italy – twenty one long years ago. Is this a situation of which we can be proud?

How do we continue to tolerate a situation where the Cup of Nations finals offers a measly $1.5 million to the winner and much less to the rest, making the most prestigious tournament in Africa a financial drain pipe on national associations – as the cost of qualifying for the tournament far exceeds the winnings on offer?

Or circumstances where CAF’s committee for ethics and fair play was presided over by a man – the disgraced Amos Adamu – whose conduct and career record has been, to all that know him, anything but ethical, as he ponders the possibility of criminal trial in a Nigerian court?

The only thing that really mattered to most of our leaders, as I witnessed, at the Friendship Hall in Khartoum, venue of the congress on February 23rd, was how to share the spoils of power on the CAF and FIFA executive committees – primarily for personal benefit, rather than for the interests of the larger commonwealth.

The night before the poll saw most of the contestants in late night caucus “meetings” lasting into the early morning.

Even paid officials of the CAF secretariat, who are supposed to be above the political fray, got their hands dirty in the politicking.

One particular official went as far as working against his own country’s interests, making a 3am visit to a member of his country’s delegation on February 22nd, to convince him to advice his candidate to step down, as the paid CAF official was in support of Algeria’s Mohamed Raouroua.

Whilst the secretaries of the various regional football groupings, like WAFU, COSAFA and CECAFA, delivered uninspiring reports, not a single proposal for the betterment of African football was on the agenda, discussed or raised by any federation president at the congress!

Omari Selemani, the president of the DR Congo Federation - who was the only national FA president to rise to the podium – sang the praises, sycophantically, of CAF president Issa Hayatou, rather than discuss the burning issues that really matter. It was, from my viewpoint, a nauseating sight.

But none of the frightened or financially compromised federation presidents (by petrodollars from the Arabian Gulf, in order to sway their vote to a particular FIFA exco candidate) had the courage to stand up before their colleagues and tell the African football family the bitter truth about the parlous state of our game, which is in desperate need of repair.

And for Hayatou, who will have served an unprecedented 25 years as CAF president, by the time his current tenure expires in 2013, there is no doubt that his health is failing.

Having bumped into him several times at Khartoum’s imposing Burj El Fateh hotel, where we both stayed, it is evident that, at 65, he no longer has the vitality and drive needed for this pressure-cooker job.

One can only hope that his comments in a recent interview with Radio France International, in which he said “it's time to think about standing down and leaving”, are genuine.

Without doubt, Hayatou’s done some good things for Africa. But it’s high time he takes an honourable bow and leaves the stage, before finding himself in the maelstrom of a popular revolt, which, inevitably, will consume him.

I vividly recall Hayatou telling me seven years ago - March 1st 2004 to be precise - in the back of a London black taxi cab (Mali’s Amadou Diakhite and Tunisia’s Slim Aloulou, both banned by FIFA, witnessed this conversation) that he had no intention of staying in his position for 25 years. But we all know the end to that story.

Disgruntled and dismayed, as the African game goes adrift, it is time for the men of intellect, vision, integrity and drive to seize the political initiative.

They can no longer moan from the sidelines and expect the staid, conservative old order to willingly hand over the reins of power they have injudiciously wielded, to their selfish benefit, for decades. As the legendary Kwame Nkrumah famously said, “seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things will be added to you.”

Only a concerted and sustained plan by the “progressives”, to win the CAF presidency in 2013, will kick start the managerial revolution that will set African football on a course enabling it to conquer the summit of the global game.

There is a man, from the southern part of the continent (his name should be pretty obvious), who is eminently qualified to lead the charge and forge a dynamic agenda. But he’s yet to throw his hat into the CAF presidential ring.

So, will this man and true lovers of the African game, with balls, (pardon the pun) please stand up? The battle for African football’s soul has just begun…