By Paul Nicholson
March 9 – Former CAF executive committee member and Liberian FA president Musa Bility has issued a warning to his African football colleagues over what he calls the “FIFA-fronted capitulation of CAF presidential candidates”.
Last weekend a deal brokered two weeks in Rabat, Morocco – in meetings hosted by Moroccan Fouzi Lekja but with FIFA executives present – saw West African candidates Augustin Senghor (Senegal), Jacques Anouma (Ivory Coast) and Ahmed Yahya (Mauritania) bow out of the election in favour of South African Patrice Motsepe.
In a statement issued by Bility he questions the diplomacy that led to their withdrawal and what African football and its governing body might have sacrificed in handing the leadership of its confederation to FIFA’s preferred billionaire businessman candidate who has no track record in international football administration.
“The capitulation follows a round of head-spinning shuttle diplomacy by FIFA president Gianni Infantino around Africa…Ominously one of those missions landed in South Africa where Infantino held a closed door meeting with South African president Cyril Ramaphosa, who just also happens to be brother-in-law to CAF presidential contender Motsepe,” says Bility.
Bility points to Infantino’s penchant for pandering “to the world’s political strongmen, just as a moth is to a flame”, saying that his previous engagement with Saudi Arabia’s Mohamed bin Salman and Russia’s Vladimir Putin have not proved to be in football’s best interests.
He says that with disgraced former president Ahmad Ahmad out the picture (banned) but with no real election now to take place, “the opportunity for African football stakeholders to show the World that they had acknowledged their previous electoral mistake, and that they were now willing to rectify it using democratic means, has been stolen from them.
“Elimination of competition remains the mainstay of the intellectually feeble and Motsepe ought to be embarrassed that he obtained his CAF presidency purely on the basis of backroom deals and not the intellectual rigours of political engagement all the way unto the ballot.”
Bility is no stranger to being on the wrong end of backroom deals or FIFA politics. He is appealing a ban at CAS that was imposed in 2019 days before CAF’s executive committee voted on the parachuting of FIFA general secretary Fatma Samoura into CAF to run the confederation as FIFA’s Delegate for Africa. Bility had been a lead voice in a call for a forensic audit of CAF’s accounts but was opposed to ceding control to FIFA. He was given the ultimatum of getting into line with FIFA, or getting banned, being told that an Ethics investigation had found him guilty of breaking FIFA’s laws, but that FIFA would make this go away if he kept quiet and towed the line. He didn’t. he was banned.
For Africa it is perhaps FIFA’s apparent lack of concern of a wider, transparent and inclusive approach to the governance of its football where Africa’s football people lead the debate and decision making for their own continent and based on their own long and wide experience…of football.
Bility relates a story that Motsepe was asked by Senghor to name five member of CAF’s current executive committee but was unable to. Surely a deeply worrying lack of knowledge about the organisation Motsepe will lead from the end of this week, whatever side of the political fence you sit on. Though perhaps making Motsepe the ideal candidate for his FIFA puppetmasters.
Bility then focusses his attention on Infantino and his motivation. “Time and again, Gianni Infantino has shown African football that he is its biggest enemy, with an attitude towards it as the same one adopted by the Belgian King Leopold II, whom our history reminds us, was the absolute owner and ruler of the Congo Free State from 1885 to 1908.
“Today Infantino has carved out the 80 African and Caribbean voting members of FIFA and kept them safely in his coat pocket, where they are supervised by his appointed prefect, the Congolese Veron Mosengo-Omba,” he continued.
“These 80 votes assure Infantino of a virtual head start in any political contest at FIFA.”
For Bility the FIFA takeover is complete as he references the rumours that a deal has already been done for Fatma Samoura to transfer back to Africa and CAF as general secretary, leaving her role at FIFA to Infantino’s other henchman Mathias Grafstrom.
“Whatever kool-aid you may prefer to help digest this information, these concessions and horse-trading spell doom for African football mainly because they are made to trade power for FIFA immunity and keep African votes in the pocket of its natural predator – Gianni Infantino.”
FIFA will be hoping that a CAS rubber-stamping of Bility’s ban will speedily remove him from their rear-view mirror. But where Bility’s voice in recent times has been the tip of Africa’s spear, FIFA should be aware that it is still a spear and FIFA’s African invasion makes a pretty big target for the rest of that spear, however hard they try to blunt it.
Contact the writer of this story at moc.l1714048935labto1714048935ofdlr1714048935owedi1714048935sni@n1714048935osloh1714048935cin.l1714048935uap1714048935