By Andrew Warshaw
February 20 – The tension ahead of next month’s potentially game-changing Confederation of African Football (CAF) presidential election is mounting after South African president Jacob Zuma was reported – apparently wrongly – to have formally given his government’s backing to Issa Hayatou despite the Council of Southern Africa Football Associations (COSAFA) executive committee officially endorsing Hayatou’s rival, Madagascar’s Ahmad Ahmad (sic).
The announcement followed a meeting on Saturday when Zuma received Hayatou at his residence in Pretoria, also attended by South African Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula and South African Football Association President Danny Jordaan.
CAF released a statement thereafter which in part claimed Zuma offered “South Africa’s flawless support for his [Hayatou’s] candidacy for a new term at the helm of the CAF.” However, that was quickly denied by Mbalulu’s office which issued a counter-statement that Zuma, whilst re-iterating support for the development of African football, “did not pledge his personal support or that of the South African government behind the name of Mr Hayatou.”
Whichever version is correct there is little doubt the jockeying for position is intensifying. COSAFA’s executive committee has seven different nations represented out of 13 members of the sub-regional body.
Hayatou, who has presided over African football since 1988, will be seeking an unprecedented eighth term at the March elections in Ethiopia.
In 2013 he was re-elected unopposed saying it would be his last term. That was after a controversial change in the regulations which barred non-members of CAF’s 13-strong Executive Council from running for the post of president.
The statute change was widely interpreted as a deliberate ploy to help Hayatou remain in power but it was reported at the weekend that he himself is repealing it next month – a year after a similar attempt to scrap it by Djibouti was rejected.
Meanwhile, FIFA President Gianni Infantino, who is on a tour of the various confederations to brief them about his development plans, is to meet more than 50 African FA presidents in Johannesburg this week.
Each of the continent´s 54 member countries has been invited to the behind-closed-doors executive summit with Infantino, the timing of which is highly significant given the proximity of the CAF election.
According to Reuters, Infantino will then travel on to Harare, ostensibly to join birthday celebrations for the Zimbabwe Football Association President Philip Chiyangwa, who is also head of COSAFA and one of Hayatou’s strongest critics.
Chiyangwa has invited a raft of African leaders to the same meeting in order to lobby support for Ahmad. Last week, CAF warned him against holding the session but he is set to defy the advice and the fact that Infantino has been invited is another indication that the FIFA boss is backing the anti-Hayatou camp.
Infantino, who has no vote in the CAF election but has engineered plenty of influence, looks determined to deliver some personal payback in terms of getting rid of Hayatou who briefly ran FIFA as its most senior vice-president after Sepp Blatter was forced out of office.
When the time came to replace Blatter permanently last year, CAF, with Hayatou at its helm, endorsed the candidacy of Infantino’s main rival for the FIFA presidency, Asian football chief Sheikh Salman bin Ebrahim al Khalifa.
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