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Dar Es Salaam, barren plain. It is Friday, February 13, 2026; an unlucky day for African football. The spectacle of the CAF Titanic is striking, not to say downright hallucinatory. Behind the Botoxed smiles in Tanzania lies the reality of a hull torn open. The icy waters of amateurism are flooding into the holds, and the institutional vessel is pitching nose-first into the abyss of leadership bankruptcy.
As governance sinks without a trace, the orchestra of “My Brother” keeps playing its syrupy melodies, hoping to drown out with blaring brass the imminent crash of a chaos already scripted in several acts.
Act I: The political boycott
The curtain rose on a scene of major rupture. The absence of Fouzi Lekjaa, President of the Royal Moroccan Football Federation and CAF’s first vice-president, at the last Comex was no scheduling accident. It was a political boycott. That is, Lekjaa’s refusal to attend this charade of a meeting was voluntary, deliberate, and deliciously icy.
By refusing to sit at that table of dupes, the number two in the CAF hierarchy sent a 4K signal of distrust: his refusal to endorse the drift of a completely derailing institution. That empty seat became the loudest message of the Comex, crashing home the point that African football cannot be governed through sovereign contempt for its own statutes.
Act II: The refereeing cat out of the bag
The hearing of Olivier Safari, the Congolese head of the Refereeing Commission, lifted the veil on the unspeakable, turning rumor into red-handed evidence. The scandal of the AFCON final is no longer corridor gossip, with reliable reports having confirmed that clear instructions were reportedly sent to referee Jean-Jacques Ndala to refrain from sanctioning those who sabotaged the match.
This sacrifice of the rulebook on the altar of a cheap “political peace” is the symbol of an institution that has traded the integrity of the whistle for backroom deals. Safari offered a full expedition into the mire, where the laws of the game are the first victims of an institutional safari without faith or law.
Act III: The lesson in respect
Patrice Motsepe’s desperate attempt to drown tensions under a veneer of artificial brotherhood fizzled out.
In this theater of false sentimentality, there was some welcome sight as Samuel Eto’o solemnly opposed a firm demand for respect of the statutes to the oily embraces of the “My Brother” orchestra. In so doing, the Cameroonian reminded everyone of an obvious truth: an institution is not run on sentiment, vibrato, or hugs, but on law. Clientelism can no longer serve as the compass of a confederation that no longer even knows where north lies.
Act IV: The legal paranormal
Here we enter the “X-Files” of bureaucracy. The Secretary General, physically absent but omnipresent in the manipulation of the score, acts as a shadow Manitou. We are witnessing the drift of a bureaucrat who, behind the scenes, plays Caliph in place of the Caliph, pulling the strings of a throne he should no longer occupy.
Yet the truth is elsewhere: it lies in the pure and simple expiration of the mandate of the man who fancied himself an eternal grand vizier. Between the age limit having been exceeded and the programmed obsolescence of mandates, it is the very legality of all decisions taken after October 2025 that evaporates into a legal Bermuda Triangle. The file is classified X.
Act V: The illusionism of the ‘“Nowhere Man’
Between press conferences worthy of Roberto Benigni on amphetamines and shooting-for-the-moon plans for a 28-team AFCON, we are presented with an improvised Nations League. The leitmotif is clear: “let’s please our potential voters.”
We are shown the outline of a competition divided by geographic zones — an electoralist sprinkling that kills the very notion of sporting meritocracy. Instead of promoting our most deserving performers, the preference is to level down in order to secure political support. The presidency whistles its famous “Trust me…,” like Disney’s serpent Kaa hypnotizing prey already digested. Motsepe has morphed into that Beatles’ Nowhere Man:
He’s a real nowhere man
Sitting in his nowhere land
Making all his nowhere plans for nobody…
Act VI: The ‘for form’s sake’ communiqué
The coup de grâce came 72 hours after the Comex, with a communiqué published solely to save appearances following the incidents of the Al Ahly-AS FAR match.
A text of distressing flabbiness, drafted by an orchestra of bureaucrats for internal consumption alone. CAF signs here the ultimate affront to the military leaders and supporters, proving that the aesthetics of make-believe now take precedence over real justice.
The coming epilogue
African football watches, stunned as the sinking of a B-series drama manages through false promises for fans who are less and less naïve. These supporters now know that promises bind only those who still believe them. And so, the curtain is increasingly — and inexorably — falling on an institution sinking under the whistles of a continent fully aware of the disaster.
