RIP ISSA HAYATOU
Picture : Issa Hayatou with an IFFHS Award at the Century Gala in Germany.
Longest serving CAF Boss, Issa Hayatou dies at 77.
His demise came after a long battle with illness before the fateful day in a French hospital. The man with the longest tenure at the helm of CAF, Issa Hayatou stepped into the sports arena as an athlete and later becoming a basketball player. In 1986 would become president of the Cameroon Football Federation after a stint as Secretary General in the then Cameroon Ministry for Youth and Sports.
After two years, he took a shot at the CAF top job winning it in 1988 in Morocco, the same year his country won the AFCON for the second time. Under him CAF took the final tournament from eight to twelve teams in 1992 and then to sixteen teams in 1996. Besides taking the continental competitions from three to fifteen during his tenure, he raised Africa’s participation at the FIFA World Cup finals from two to five in 1994 and later helped bring the prestigious tournament to the African soil when South Africa hosted it in 2010. Under Hayatou, Africa won the Olympic football gold twice: in 1996 through Nigeria and in 2000 through Cameroon. He had hoped that he would win an eighth and final term during which he would be the man in charge when Cameroon would host the AFCON for the second time, but the delegates to the 39th CAF General Assembly held at the Nelson Mandela Plenary Hall of the African Union Building in Addis Abeba on March 16, 2017 handed the command baton to Malagasy Fishery Minister Ahmad Ahmad on a 34 to 20 score. Hayatou’s reaction following what was an upset reverberated across the hall in a concession remark that targeted FIFA boss, Gianni Infantino whose presence had been said to conclude a project he had reportedly carried on to oust his football ‘foe’. Cameroon, Africa and the football world at large with the IFFHS mourn the man who did not only rule CAF for 29 years but was also briefly FIFA boss to pave the way for Infantino after Sepp Blatter had fallen out of favour.