10 Oct 2023

The awarding of hosting rights for the Africa Cup of Nations (AFCON) by the Confederations of African Football (CAF) needs to be done more transparently in order to be deemed credible.

Speaking at the Botswana bid committee 2027 press briefing in Gaborone recently, Minister of Youth, Gender, Sport and Culture, Tumiso Rakgare indicated that they were skeptical in the way Botswana lost the hosting rights to the joint trio of Tanzania, Kenya and Uganda.

“When we left for Cairo, Egypt, we were of the view that the bid would be determined by the report of the PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), who were engaged by CAF to conduct inspections across the bidding nations,” he said.

Rakgare indicated that the report had ranked Botswana at position two with 64 per cent, behind Algeria who were at 78 per cent and that after Algeria withdrew at the last minute, Botswana was then, on the basis of the report, given a legitimate expectation to get the bid.

“We were surprised when CAF decided to subject the bidding nations to a verbal presentation and a vote, which is where we lost the bid.

Voting is a regressive form because it is prone to external influence, and as a country, doing things through the back door is just not our thing.

This whole process led to suspicion regarding the conduct of the whole thing,” he said.

Even up to today, he said they were still not aware how many votes went to which bidding country as that was never disclosed.

Rakgare however, said they respected the fact that CAF was an autonomous organisation with liberty to define its own rules and regulations, but said the organisation should be transparent in conducting things.

He appreciated the bid committee for its efforts, and that if Botswana wanted to make another bid in future, it would not need to put together another bid book as they could still just update the one for the 2027 bid.

Rakgare said even though Botswana lost the rights to host AFCON 2027, the country would not be deterred in its effort to bring international events to the county through the MICE initiative.

“We are proud that we gave it our best shot. We gave a good account of ourselves as a nation and I can assure Batswana that the best is yet to come in as far as hosting international events is concerned,” he said.

He said the idea to bid for hosting was mooted as far back as 2019, and that before the country formally presented its bid, it had worked behind the scenes to assess the feasibility of hosting and was satisfied of potential returns in areas such as jobs creation, infrastructure development, boosting tourist as well as creating a good image of the country internationally.

“Even after Namibia ditched us last minute, we were still confident of the benefits hence the decision to go solo than withdraw,” he said.

Bid committee chairperson, Ashford Mamelodi said PWC report indicated that Botswana did well in areas of safety, security and tourism, but was let down by lack of readily available facilities such a stadia and hotels. He thanked Batswana for their support throughout the journey. Ends