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Politics and Football in Africa
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As the continent's favorite sport, football remains popular and widely played across the African continent. Issa Hayatou, former president of the CAF, had negotiated a deal with French broadcasting company Lagardere for exclusive rights to broadcasting the tournament. Hayatou, for his part, denies any wrongdoing and claims that all funds mentioned were simply "gifts" to the CAF. Rights have since been sold to Qatari firm BEIN Sport, which has ties to the al-Khalifa family, implicated, along with Hayatou, in the FIFA corruption scandals around the controversial 2022 World Cup award to Qatar. Hayatou was intimiatly involved in the scandals at FIFA as a close associate of Blatter, and for a time was even elected acting head of the agency as a whole following Blatter's resignation This already shaky position was made worse as domestic FA heads had grown more uneasy about the allegations of corruption and the concerns over the 2019 African Cup of Nations award to Cameroon, which they sensed would be yet another pet project by Hayatou for his own prestige and wealth gain. The combination of factors created an environment where Ahmad, by all accounts a relative unknown among the executive committee, was given a chance to win leadership of the organization as a whole winning 34 out of 54 possible votes. Ahmad, among other things, promised to work closer with agencies and companies on the continent, rather than the practice of outsourcing broadcasting to large European and Middle Eastern firms as Hayatou had done, and to develop domestic infrastructure in concert with African FAs. Nyantakyi, at the time, was also a high ranking FIFA member aside from his duties as president of the Ghanaian FA. Including conversations with match fixers, team members and FIFA and FA officials, the report dictates that the level of corruption is so apparent that a market of sorts has formed with established prices known among all actors for various officiating calls, game results and other potential match altering. In the Mubarak era, football was used as a way of humanizing the regime and connecting with fans, as well as a driver of a collective national project, with the government investing heavily in the sport and even going so far as to directly own, through itself or ministers, 10 of the top flight clubs. Stadiums have since been reopened for national team games, starting with the qualifier campaign for the 2018 Russia World Cup, but club teams still play in front of empty arenas. Professor of Anthropology Bea Vidacs, in her work on Cameroon, analyzed the way in which perceptions about identity have shifted over time and topic, specifically pertaining to football.<ref name":10" /> The study, focusing on media and popular discourse around the sport, found that people's sense of national pride increased when talking about football, the national team, and legendary players such as Samuel Eto'o.<ref name":10" /> People tended to refer to themselves as "Cameroonian" rather than their ethnic or linguistic designations, and the long standing division between the Francophone and Anglophone sections of the country seem to dissolve in media talks around the sport.<ref name":10" /> Politicians have noticed this trend, and football serves for them, but also for the people, as a mechanism to consolidate the concept and idea of the state as a construct in the minds of people, specifically through the vectors of the national team and the success of players of the nationality in foreign leagues.<ref name":10" /> More successful than the national project propaganda, in the author's view, in Cameroon, was the competition in the 1994 World Cup, where, for the first time, near universal self identification as Cameroonian became commonplace as people celebrated the run of their "Indomitable Lions".<ref name":10" /> As a whole, football provides a mechanism for belonging and unification of spirit and identity in a way that traditional nationalism cannot, simply because it brings the population together to discuss and appreciate a common interest.<ref name":10" />
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