Dark clouds over African Cup of Nations

By Ian Hawkey

The passenger jet began its descent over Luanda airport. Then it rose again, sharply. The athletes on board stopped their banter and looked at each other, puzzled. They could not land for a while, the players of Zimbabwe’s national football team were told from the cockpit. Shells had lit up the sky.

“Angola was about the scariest experience I had in all my many years playing around Africa,” remembers Bruce Grobbelaar, the former Zimbabwe goalkeeper. “We had to circle in the plane all the way down into the airport, because someone was shooting at planes.”

Once on the ground for their World Cup qualifier, he and his teammates breathed a sigh of relief. At the stadium, the footballers shuddered again. “They must have had about 80,000 people in there and it only held 50,000. There were armed soldiers everywhere.”

Such was the dread African footballers used to feel on a visit to Angola. That was 15 years ago. Yet today it hosts an international football festival with a profile exceeded only by the World Cup and the European Championship in what was supposed to be an enchanting endorsement of how far the country has moved on since a grinding, intractable civil war gave way to peace.

Until last Friday afternoon, the idea was that bringing the 27th Africa Cup of Nations to Angola would show off the country as a beacon for a wider African renaissance, a symbol of a continent where wars are ended more often than started, where big projects such as sports events, can, and do, work.

That symbol vanished amid the fire of sub-machineguns close to the border separating the Angolan exclave of Cabinda from Congo-Brazzaville. The attack left three of the Togolese national squad’s expedition to the tournament dead.

The so-called peace dividend in Angola that the next three weeks were to show off has been shattered by armed gunmen from a separatist movement in Cabinda. Any arguments pointing out the that nearly all of that land is free of militias will from now on sound pedantic, hollow and in bad taste. “We perhaps underestimated the threat in Cabinda,” said the Angolan minister for the region, Antonio Bento Bembe, yesterday.

 

It was as close to a mea culpa as could be detected from the organisers and hosts of a tournament that had already looked more clumsily put together and planned than any Cup of Nations for 20 years. The choice of Cabinda among the four host cities had attracted questions, given the distance of the exclave — it has no borders with the rest of Angola — from other sites, and because of the activities of violent separatists.

Organisers were as hasty to point fingers at the Togolese Football Federation as they had been slow to respond to a deadly crisis. The TFF found itself subjected to criticism over arrangements made for the squad’s arrival in Cabinda. According to the organising committee, teams had been told to travel between the four host cities only by air. Togo, says the Confederation of African Football (Caf) had also been the one participant who failed to advise organisers how they would be reaching Angola.

They had decided to do so by bus, apparently because that felt the logical way to move from the site of their preparations, in Congo-Brazzaville, to Cabinda. By road their journey was less than 200km. By air, they would almost certainly have needed to fly to Luanda, and then back north again to Cabinda. Expense may have been a factor.

If costs had shaped their itinerary, they would not be the first African team to suffer fatally for economies. In 1993, all passengers on board an ageing military aircraft taking the Zambia team to a World Cup qualifier perished when it plunged into the Atlantic off the coast of Gabon.

The aftermath of that tragedy, as the investigation gave way to friction, accusation and counter-claim between Gabon and Zambia governments, was starting to be echoed 24 hours after the Cabinda horror. As Togolese players spoke of their intention to quit the competition, Angola said their international futures could be jeopardised if they did.

Constant Omari, a member of the organising committee, said any team forfeiting their place would be liable “to the sanctions stated in the rules”. They state that any team quitting less than 20 days before, or during, the tournament will be fined US$50,000 and banned for the next two tournaments.

Then Togo’s government broke the impasse, ordering the team to return home. “Unfortunately,” said Huber Velud, head coach of Togo, “this issue is becoming one that allows people to avoid taking responsibility.” He called what happened “an act of war. There was a lot blood in the bus and we were terrified. The rebels firing at us were armed to the teeth.”

As the death toll rose, with confirmation that Velud’s assistant Amalete Abalo and Togo press officer Stan Ocloo had died, the tournament’s existence was cast into doubt. One Togo footballer, Alaixys Romao, called for the withdrawal of other teams in the group mainly based in Cabinda: the Ivory Coast, captained by Didier Drogba; Ghana, whose skipper is Michael Essien: and Burkina Faso.

That always seemed unlikely. While sympathy from other players has been widespread, the Cup of Nations remains a biennial peak in the careers of Africa’s best footballers. Those employed by the elite clubs of Europe have already stood up, every two years, to strong pressure not to honour these finals because it means missing a segment of the European club season, from where the event is often regarded as an awkward intrusion.

That view misses the unequal nature of the relationship between the football cultures of the two continents. The best African footballers spend most of their high-achieving years in front of live audiences outside their own continent. The Cup of Nations is precious to them, their families and friends from their childhoods and their compatriots because it is when they perform principally for their countries, and do so in Africa.

And the Cup of Nations has developed apace in the past 20 years. It is broadcast across the world and has taken with great zeal its charabanc of stars and its engaging entourage of showy fans to unlikely venues such as impoverished Mali, in 2002, and marginalised Burkina Faso, in 1998, with great success. Angola was confidently predicted to be another pleasant surprise. So is the next event, to be shared between Gabon and Equatorial Guinea.

As for Africa’s next global sporting festival, that will be in the country whose favourite storylines are all about the phoenix that rises from the ashes of conflict.

The first World Cup in South Africa is five months away and its build-up has been punctuated by concerns over safety from those travelling there.

That, it should be stressed, is as far as a comparison with the awful security failure in Angola extends. South Africa does not have armed political militias on its territory, even if it does have an alarming record for violent crime. And Johannesburg is just about as far away from Cabinda as Donetsk is from London. “Each country’s security is its own issue,” said Danny Jordaan of the 2010 World Cup organising committee. “Angola is very different from South Africa and to say this has implications is like saying a bomb in Spain would affect a World Cup in England.”

TIMELINE

Friday 5.10pm Reports of attack on Togo’s team bus

5.40pm Driver reported dead and players injured

8.40pm Separatist group FLEC claim responsibility

9.44pm CAF (African Football Federation) say tournament will go ahead as planned

Saturday 7am CAF says Togo had not notified them of their travel arrangements

1.30pm Reports confirm three dead and two players, Obilale and Akakpo, are shot

3pm Obilale airlifted to South Africa for surgery

6pm Togo government makes official statement announcing team’s withdrawal:

The UK Sunday Times