Even in his first press conference after Monday’s disaster at the Stade Olembé in which eight fans died, Patrice Motsepe, the president of the Confederation of African Football, was looking to shift the blame. He convened a commission to investigate the causes – it was expected to report on Friday, but is yet to do so – but the avoidance of corporate responsibility had begun already.
There was the gate that was “inexplicably” shut. And that, almost certainly, was the direct cause of the buildup of people and the surge towards the open gate that knocked down a temporary barrier and led to people being trampled on. Whoever didn’t open that shut gate will take the blame.
Motsepe also spoke of fans without tickets. Nobody seems to doubt that is true, but neither is it provable – and the stadium was not full to capacity (although it was probably full beyond the supposed 80% cap imposed because of Covid); the problem was not the number of fans but their distribution. A photograph taken well before kick-off shows clearly the problem of a handful of police trying to check a growing crowd of thousands 20 yards or so in front of the fence where the tragedy occurred.
But there are causes and there are causes. “Security,” Motsepe said, “is the responsibility of the local organising committee and it is not Caf’s responsibility. Caf’s responsibility is to advise. Caf has no legal obligation and has no responsibility and should not be blamed. But we are partners and it’s not time to point fingers.”
Yet he had already done so twice.
It’s easy – and not untrue – to say the cause is a basic one of crowd control. There has been talk that yet another perimeter fence had been planned but not built, and of the need for security checks to be conducted more quickly (in Douala on Saturday, they were more complex and slower), and perhaps there is merit in both points, but the fundamental issue was that too many people turned up at the same place at the same time.
There may have been soldiers in that area, but looking menacing with an AK47 is of little use – and neither would the rooftop snipers who suddenly appeared on Saturdayyesterday have been – when what was needed was to divert large numbers of people away from the south entrance to the east and north.
Clearly, the local organisers must bear responsibility for that. But then, how many major football matches are held in Cameroon? How often do their authorities have to deal with crowds of 60,000? There were 25,000 at Cameroon’s last home World Cup qualifier, and 10,000 at the one before that – and both of those were played not in Yaoundé but in Douala. It’s Caf that hosts tournaments every two years and Caf that has the experience; it cannot sit above the carnage and casually brush off responsibility.
There have been suggestions from insiders that Motsepe has been appalled by the disorganisation and lack of leadership he has found at Caf. It has never been the most efficiently run governing body, mired in infighting and corruption, but things clearly got worse since Issa Hayatou’s 29-year reign came to an end with defeat to Ahmad Ahmad in a presidential election in 2017.
Ahmad was forced to resign after corruption charges last year and is serving a Fifa-imposed two-year ban from football, with Motsepe, a South African mining tycoon, elected unopposed as his replacement. He was the candidate favoured by the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, and the global governing body’s influence within Caf is growing.
That may, in time, lead to World Cup-style efficiencies, but it must also be a serious concern. Caf should exist to run and promote African football, not as a voting bloc to support Infantino and his schemes. Infantino was at the Council of Europe this past week, explaining the “need to find ways to include the whole world to give hope to Africans so that they don’t need to cross the Mediterranean in order to find maybe a better life but, more probably, death in the sea”.
A worthy aim, no doubt, but he was clearly talking in the context of staging the World Cup every two years, a plan that may have the support of Caf, or at least the presidents of various vocal federations, but does not seem popular at all among anybody else in African football: delegates, coaches, players, journalists or fans.
It’s easy to see why Infantino supports a biennial World Cup: he thinks it would raise more revenues for Fifa (although exactly how much is disputed) and would be a strike against Uefa in their wrangle for political control over the game. But just as it would diminish the Euros, so it would diminish the Cup of Nations – and it’s very hard to see how that benefits African football as a whole.
There 24 teams playing in a major tournament of decent standard every two years; who benefits if that is overshadowed by a global tournament that, following the model for the expanded 2026 World Cup would feature nine African sides every two years? Certainly not teams such as the Gambia, Burkina Faso, Equatorial Guinea and Comoros, who have lit up this Cup of Nations and shown how the African middle is rising even if the traditional giants have plateaued.
But the truth is that the Cup of Nations is a success despite Caf and not because of it. It’s hardly a new phenomenon, but at every turn the tournament is mismanaged, from the poor accommodation endured by the Gambia and other teams to the dithering and ultimately aborted attempt to play the final minutes of Mali against Tunisia after the referee blew early for full time, to the abject media facilities in Douala, to the appalling fact that two and a half years after the tournament was scheduled to kick off, the Stade Olembé is still unfinished – and, unless more money is found to pay contractors, will remain so.
There is a culture of indecisiveness and inaction and that creates an environment in which tragedies such as Monday’s can occur. Caf may, as Motsepe claimed, bear no legal responsibility, but it cannot simply blame somebody else, move on and forget what has happened.
