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On Thursday, March 26, the Senegal Football Federation (FSF) staged a press conference to address the ongoing, now infamous and sometimes laughable post-AFCON drama as Paris, to borrow from the apt poetry of Jacques Dutrong, “awakened at five o’clock as… the cobblestones of Place Dauphine stretched, the shadow of Pont-Neuf grew…”
By ten o’clock, Paris was indeed awake, though now without any traces of Dutrong’s soothing, eloquent poetry. By this time that day, the cobblestones were no longer jewels. They served instead as the backdrop for a clumsy theatrical performance as the curtain rose in cathedral-like silence, quickly broken by a cry meant to be evocative of Emile Zola’s historic “I accuse!”
But not everyone is Zola. Indeed, on that somber Thursday, the shadow of the author of “Germinal” quickly gave way to more familiar figures: Louis de Funès, stomping with powerless rage, eyebrows in chaos, flanked by a bewildered Michel Galabru, eyes wide at the absurdity of it all.
For while Zola had the elegance of a crusader for justice, the beleaguered FSF president and his Politburo have only the disjointed script of a bad vaudeville — in the style of New York State Police-inspired drama without any Oscar-worthy actors.
From Sam the pianist to Sembène Ousmane’s The Mandate
Then the play — or drama — being run or produced by the FSF devolves into farce the moment they start talking of opening a criminal probe into the corruption and back-office manipulation that they believe led to CAF’s verdict to strip Senegal of the AFCON 2025 trophy. It is as though SFP is desperately searching for Sam, the loyal pianist, to beg him to play again.
“Play it again, Sam!” comes a cry from afar, urging the beloved artist to perform the worn-out tune of victimhood now spoiling this legitimate debate about how CAF should punish the fiasco of the AFCON final to make sure another inexcusable wall-off never happens again in African football. But in trying too hard to turn Maryland into a theater set, FSF is sliding from Uncle Sam’s Cabin to Uncle Tom’s.
“Objection, your honor!” says one of the FSF lawyers as they take the post-AFCON saga to the Court of Arbitration for Sports (CAS). This came as five individuals were being publicly named for corruption this Thursday in Paris by the FSF’s team of lawyers. They said they have“drafted” their complaints and have identified U.S. jurisdictions (probably in New York or Washington) to settle the matter. But never mind the names of the alleged corrupters, the exact sums they supposedly used to subdue CAF, or any concrete evidence of the “scam” or “scandalous corruption” for that matter.
We are just being told, for the theatrical sake of the suspension of disbelief, to believe FSF’s theater of the absurd, to embrace their victimhood narrative, and to not question the tenuous legal bases of their CAS appeal. Wielding international criminal law like a joker card while refusing to return the trophy and medals, the FSF appears to be menacingly looking down our necks while smilingly asking us to “just believe the victim.” This dramatic appeal to made-in-America cosmic justice reflects the posture of an “Uncle Tom,” a bizarre dependence on a foreign authority for matters that should have remained continental.
Ideally, the case should have been taken to CAF ethics committees, or failing that, FIFA’s. But no, FSF wanted this AFCON circus to turn into pure “Wag the Dog” territory. Bereft of a strong legal case, the FSF president and his team of lawyers are serving us a media war designed to cover up the troubles of a leadership cornered at home.
Above all, at least for those familiar with Senegalese literature, we are watching a remake of Ousmane Sembène’s short story “The Mandate.” Sembène’s story speaks of the bureaucracy of emptiness, the frantic chase after imaginary paper. At the end of which, as is always the case in that Kafkaesque universe of the uselessness and dehumanizing oppression of bureaucracy, one ends up losing dignity when begging for foreign justice.
Swiss silence
While FSF apparently now prefers narrative and victimhood-driven PR signals to the simple question of what really happened, the truth of the matter at hand emerges from a simple question recently posed by a Moroccan colleague about Articles 82 and 84 of the CAF regulations. As reality sets in, cracks open the legal case to Senegal’s disadvantage, the Swiss lawyer of the FSF, in true Helvetic fashion, stalls for time and dodges. Unable to answer on substance, he resorts to procedural escape.
Yet delay and tactics based on narrative cannot hide the truth of what happened on January 18 in the now famously — and unprecedentedly — dramatic AFCON final. Indeed, both the official match reports and footage of the incidents that marred the AFCON final all converge in proving that the FSF’s legal case is empty.
And as they are left facing the rigors of pure law to prove an unprovable case, their strategy is all too predictable: move along, there is nothing to see here! As a parody of Clint Eastwood suddenly speaking like Jamel Debbouze or Gad Elmaleh would put it: “Listen, my brother, it’s simple, it’s math! The world is divided in two: those who have the law, and those who make noise… And you, all you’ve got is noise!”
At the height of the burlesque
Here the play reaches its comic peak as the FSF and some Senegalese officials turn to politicizing the case of their countrymen detained in Morocco for AFCON final vandalism. We are thus subjected to a low-budget Greek tragedy as these eighteen Senegalese supporters suddenly turn into “state hostages” of Morocco’s “diplomatic blackmail.”
There is no serious way to respond to this preposterous accusation, except to dismiss it for it is: a comedic script truly worthy of a good “Marrakech du Rire” sketch. Because the exaggeration here is such that one could almost forget that these are supporters convicted by the Rabat court for acts caught live: attempt to invade the pitch, destruction of public property, premeditated violence against law-enforcement officers, and unlawful possession of pyrotechnics.
Applying Law 09-09 on preventing violence in sports events is a matter of national sovereignty. Meanwhile, describing this right as “hostage taking” denies the separation of powers cherished by Montesquieu to feed a victimhood narrative. Morocco’s judicial system is not a prop in a vaudeville act.
Bluff logic versus Cartesian reason
But the height of absurdity of this whole, endless saga is the baseless argument about the trophy and medals. Let’s be Cartesian for two minutes: From the very moment the CAF Appeal Board ruled that Senegal lost the AFCON final by forfeit, Morocco automatically and legally became the holder of the continental title.
A seven-year-old could grasp the logic at play here: if you lose by forfeit, the trophy is no longer yours. It must be returned, as must the medals. Yet some cling to the object like a talisman, replacing basic logic with media bluff. At the heart of this absurd defiance is the ill-advised embrace of the bad-loser syndrome as some kind of doctrine to restore or defend national pride.
When bitterness and bias cloud the judgement of a good expert
And what of Augustin Senghor, one of FSF attorneys? As a good lawyer, he surely knows the weight of statutes. Yet where the law requires clarity and accountability, he is now choosing silence, self-serving reasoning, and nationalism-tainted resentment.
Senghor was among the architects of the Rabat consensus that brought the current CAF leadership to power under FIFA’s supervision. Back then, he presented himself as a guarantor of a reformed and transparent CAF. Today, his silence about the very regulations he himself validated reveals culpable neglect.
If he knew, why did he remain silent? If he didn’t, why did he hold a watchman’s post? Deprived of the position he long coveted at FIFA, he has turned this personal failure into a pathetic vendetta against the FRMF and its president. One cannot rebuild a house with people who watched its foundations crumble without saying a word.
Epilogue: Lausanne and the triumph of reason
When the opportunists stop the famous “I post, therefore I exist,” this vaudeville performance will finally lower its curtains. As Jacques Chirac would say of deflating balloons, it will go “pshiit.”
Law, unlike buzz, imposes silence and clarity. Those who “splash about,” as General de Gaulle put it, will make way for the wise and competent jurists.
Before the CAS, the compatriots of the late Léopold Sédar Senghor will eventually understand that a log that remains ten years in the river does not become a crocodile. Let time and the law do their work.
But let’s finish this necessary exercise of myth- or illusion-busting by stressing that this article or op-ed is directed at the illusion-peddlers who will recognize themselves, not at the Senegalese people who remain attached to authentic Teranga, that sense of hospitality, generosity, and warmth solidarity that defines the great nation of Senegal.
