Master of the Game

He has been reigning over continental football since 1988. He has made the fortune of the federations and the CAF. It is said he is authoritarian, autocratic, clever, political, ‘bulletproof’, and in 2017 will run for an eighth term as head of the pan-African organisation.

It’s a Ghanaian manager that brings it up: ‘FIFA (International Federation of Football) no longer has an age limit for its committee members, CAF (Confederation of African Football) wants to bring its regulations into alignment’. Therefore, the governing body of continental football is to abolish the rule prohibiting anyone over the age of 70 to stand as a candidate to become a member of its Executive Committee. A detail that technically would allow its current President, 68 year-old Issa Hayatou, to run for an eighth term in 2017. Should we see this as a desire to preserve what has been achieved, a craving for stability? Or yet another manifestation of the power of the Cameroonian autocrat? Because Hayatou, who is said not to own a mobile telephone, and should be contacted via his bodyguards, took charge of the CAF in 1988. He will therefore have presided over fifteen Africa Cup of Nations (CAN) out of the thirty organised up to this point.

A process managed in the same way as the organisations he has controlled: with undeniable efficiency and some authority, which is evident today when asking questions about it: you feel, to say the least, a degree of restraint on the part of the people interviewed for this portrait… The CAF President is not a football man; he was a 400- and 800-meter athlete, an international basketball player and physical education teacher. But he is also the brother of Sadou Hayatou, Cameroon’s Prime Minister from 1991 to 1992. This inf luential fami ly from the north of the country fast-tracked him to the post of General Secretary of the Cameroon Football Federation f (Fecafoot) in 1974, while still only 28 years of age. Appointed Sporting Director to the Ministry of Youth and Sports in 1982, he became President of Fecafoot in 1986. In a few months he turned everything on its head. Frenchman, Claude Leroy, head coach for the Indomitable Lions from 1985 to 1988, recalls: ‘He managed to structure the local championships, youth trials and create technical management on a national level.’ In 1988, after the resignation of Ethiopian Ydnekatchew Tessema, he took over the reins of CAF. It was his first magnum opus, the first expression of his talent to win and retain power.

On the information website Cameroon-Info.Net, Hayatou himself describes his victory on the 10th March 1988: ‘When I stood as candidate I had little chance of winning, according to some, because a large majority had emerged for my competitor from Togo, Godfried Ekoue, Unfortunately, he was surrounded by people who had no right to vote. And that’s where many people got it wrong; when it comes to being elected to the CAF or FIFA, it’s the associations who vote.’ Knowing how to surround yourself with the right support became his policy. That day, it took several rounds of a close vote to produce a winner. From that moment on, Hayatou overindulged the national federations. According to many, he was a very intrusive President. Over the years, he extended his grip on the Executive Committee of CAF. In 2012, when Jacques Anouma, then head of the Ivorian Football Federation (FIF), planned to challenge him for the Presidency of CAF in 2013, the leaders of the organisation voted in an amendment limiting the right to run for the highest office to members or former members of the Executive Committee. Which therefore excluded the unwise…