Patrice Motsepe and the African Art of Bowing to Power

There are apologies that reveal contrition, and there are apologies that merely expire.

In January 2020, Patrice Motsepe sat at a dinner in Davos with Donald Trump and decided, with the serene confidence that sometimes accompanies several billion dollars, that he had been appointed spokesman for a continent. “Africa loves America,” he told Trump. “Africa loves you.”

This was not an expression of affection for some unknown political quantity whose character would reveal itself only later. By then Trump had spent years peddling the racist birther fiction that America’s first Black president was not really American. He had been reported to have described African nations and Haiti as “shithole countries”. He had imposed a travel ban principally targeting several Muslim-majority countries and presided over a border policy that tore thousands of children from their parents. The world had heard the recording in which he spoke about women with a vulgarity that would embarrass a drunken adolescent. Only weeks before Motsepe’s declaration of continental affection, Trump had been impeached by the United States House of Representatives for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress.

This, apparently, was the man Africa loved. Africa, inconveniently, had not been consulted.

The reaction was sufficiently fierce that Motsepe later apologised. He conceded something that should not have required a billionaire’s voyage of self-discovery: “I do not have the right to speak on behalf of anybody except myself.” A useful principle. It appears to have lasted about as long as most New Year’s resolutions.

Motsepe is now president of the Confederation of African Football, and all 54 African football associations have this week, for the second time unanimously endorsed Gianni Infantino for another term as president of FIFA, even as serious questions about Infantino’s stewardship multiplied elsewhere. Not 45. Not 50. Not even the occasional eccentric federation insisting upon the unfashionable activity known as independent thought. All 54. The word “unanimously” should make anyone with democratic instincts nauseous.

Real communities contain disagreement. Serious institutions contain dissent. Thinking people occasionally arrive at different conclusions. Fifty-four separate organisations examining a controversial incumbent and arriving at precisely the same judgment is theoretically possible in much the same way that 54 consecutive coin tosses may land heads. One should admire the statistical achievement.

Apparently, from Cairo to Cape Town, Dakar to Dar es Salaam, every football administrator examined Infantino’s record, stroked his chin, consulted his conscience and independently announced: more of this, please. Not one dissenter. Not one abstention. Not one bureaucrat accidentally developing a spine.

Motsepe has helpfully explained the philosophy behind his own support. Infantino, he says, is not merely a friend but a “loyal friend.” He has been “loyal to Africa.” Motsepe comes, he says, from a background where one does not stab loyal people in the back.

How touching. It is also an astonishing description of institutional governance.

CAF is not a stokvel. FIFA is not a family wedding. The presidency of world football is not inherited by the cousin who remembered to visit when somebody was sick. The relevant question is not whether Gianni Infantino has been loyal to Patrice Motsepe. It is whether Gianni Infantino has been loyal to the principles his office supposedly represents.

Motsepe appears to regard Infantino’s apology over the failed FIFA investment proposal as largely dispositive of the controversy. Even if one grants him that entirely, even if the investment affair is placed neatly in a box and removed from the table, it disposes of none of what follows.

This is the FIFA president who presided over the invention of a FIFA Peace Prize and then bestowed its inaugural version upon Donald Trump. Infantino told Trump that he deserved it and assured him that he could count upon Infantino’s support and that of the football community. The football community apparently discovered its political position at the same moment the rest of us did.

This is also the Infantino who received a telephone call from Trump concerning the suspension of American forward Folarin Balogun after a red card at the World Cup. FIFA’s disciplinary machinery subsequently deferred the automatic suspension, allowing Balogun to play against Belgium. FIFA insists its judicial bodies are independent. Perhaps they are. Independence simply acquires a slightly theatrical quality when the president of the United States can telephone the president of FIFA about a pending disciplinary matter, and the punishment thereafter becomes more accommodating.

There was considerably less enthusiasm when Omar Abdulkadir Artan of Somalia arrived in Miami. Artan was not a president. He was not a billionaire. He did not own a tower. He could offer no political patronage. He was merely Africa’s outstanding male referee for 2025, selected by FIFA itself to officiate at its World Cup.

American immigration authorities denied him entry. FIFA suddenly developed the constitution of a field mouse. Immigration, it explained, was a matter for the host government.

This organisation can move billions, rearrange international calendars, negotiate with governments, demand host-country undertakings and summon national federations to obedience. But place an African referee before an American immigration official and the supposed governing body of world football begins examining its shoes. One searches CAF’s magnificent unanimity for evidence that this humiliation of one of Africa’s finest officials produced so much as a cough. Apparently “loyalty to Africa” does not require much loyalty to Africans.

Then there is Gaza. Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and within four days FIFA and UEFA suspended Russian teams. Whatever one thinks about sporting sanctions, there was no shortage of institutional courage.

Palestinian footballers were killed. Football facilities were destroyed. The longstanding issue of Israeli clubs operating in occupied Palestinian territory remained unresolved. Suddenly FIFA discovered jurisprudence. Committees appeared, investigations blossomed, legal assessments multiplied and procedure became positively sacred.

Russia received four days. Israel received a seminar.

When FIFA’s own Disciplinary Committee eventually found the Israel Football Association responsible for multiple breaches involving offensive behaviour, discrimination and racist abuse, the punishment amounted substantially to a fine, warning and prevention programme. And Africa’s football aristocracy looked upon this spectacle and apparently saw nothing requiring reconsideration. Not one of 54.

Any one of these episodes should trouble the head of African football. Together they should make personal loyalty to Infantino an embarrassment rather than a qualification for endorsing him.

This is where the episode ceases to be merely about Infantino and becomes an indictment of a certain African governing class.

Africa has no shortage of courageous people. Its history is saturated with men and women who challenged empires, dictators, apartheid systems, armies and prisons. Yet somehow many of those who rise into the continent’s modern administrative elite acquire an extraordinary talent for bending at the waist whenever money and international power enter the room.

They thunder about sovereignty before domestic audiences and whisper gratitude in the corridors of international institutions. They invoke Mandela, Lumumba and Nkrumah in speeches and behave like assistant managers in somebody else’s imperial hotel. They speak endlessly of African dignity while practising the politics of the extended hand.

The master has changed. The crouch survives.

Colonial rule once depended upon chiefs, intermediaries and local notables who discovered that serving power could be materially preferable to confronting it. The uniforms have disappeared. The psychology has proved more difficult to retire. Today the arrangement comes with business-class travel, conference badges, development grants, FIFA distributions and five-star declarations about “partnership”.

The old colonial intermediary waited outside the governor’s residence. The modern one flies there in first class.

And when the financial trough is sufficiently well stocked, 54 snouts can apparently discover unanimity with remarkable speed.

One must be precise here. There is no basis simply to declare that African federations have been bought. That would require evidence. But there is every basis to examine a structure in which FIFA distributes enormous sums to national associations, those associations vote for the FIFA president, and the beneficiaries then mysteriously discover an almost North Korean enthusiasm for the incumbent.

Patronage is rarely stupid enough to issue receipts. It prefers vocabulary: “development,” “solidarity,” “partnership,” “the football family.” Wonderful phrases. They sound far better than: the man at the top controls a river of money flowing toward the people who decide whether he remains at the top.

Fifty-four organisations. Fifty-four consciences. One opinion.

The continent that produced some of history’s most formidable anti-colonial movements has somehow produced football administrators who resemble a reception committee awaiting the governor-general. And presiding over the receiving line is Patrice Motsepe.

South Africa deserves a special mention in this procession because its own football association did not merely disappear anonymously into the continental herd. SAFA formally nominated Infantino for another term. Under the presidency of Danny Jordaan, its National Executive Committee went further and announced that SAFA “exclusively supports” Infantino and would sign no declaration supporting another candidate.

There is something almost comical about the certainty. No alternative candidates had yet been announced. No competing credentials had been weighed. SAFA had apparently completed the democratic exercise before the democratic exercise had begun. It had identified the indispensable man in advance and closed the door before anyone else had even reached it.

This is not endorsement after deliberation. It is allegiance in anticipation. The message to any possible challenger could hardly be clearer: save yourself the trouble. South Africa’s football establishment has already examined candidates who do not yet exist, considered arguments that have not yet been made, weighed records that have not yet been presented and concluded that no one can possibly equal Gianni Infantino.

One could hardly design a more efficient form of democratic theatre. The election remains in the future. The thinking is already over.

And then there is Jordaan himself. He has occupied the summit of South African football for more than a decade and is presently before a Specialised Commercial Crimes Court with co-accused on fraud and theft charges arising from allegations concerning the use of SAFA money for his personal benefit. He denies wrongdoing and has not been convicted. That qualification matters. But so does the spectacle.

South Africa, still recovering from an era in which the boundaries between public institutions, private benefit and patronage became catastrophically porous, might have expected its football guardians to be unusually sensitive to governance and accountability. Instead, SAFA rushes to become Infantino’s exclusive admirer. An institution facing its own profound questions about accountability encounters an international president facing profound questions about accountability and concludes that unconditional endorsement is the answer.

The wagons do not merely circle. They exchange congratulatory letters.

Jordaan’s position also illustrates the peculiar fraternity of football power. Infantino congratulated Jordaan upon his re-election at SAFA. Jordaan’s SAFA now exclusively nominates Infantino for re-election at FIFA. Motsepe supports Infantino because Infantino has been a “loyal friend.” Everyone appears intensely loyal to everyone else. What a remarkably affectionate profession international football administration has become.

The supporter might reasonably ask whether anybody in this circle is loyal to the public.

This is courtier politics. The courtier does not ask whether the king is right. He asks whether the king remembers who applauded. His supreme political virtue is proximity and his greatest fear exclusion from the room: power first, principles later. Sometimes never.

This matters beyond football because a peculiar movement has arisen in South Africa proposing Motsepe as a future president of the ANC and perhaps ultimately of South Africa. Motsepe says he does not want the job. The nation should preserve that statement in laminated form.

Wealth is not a moral failing. But neither is it a public qualification. A billionaire may be visionary or vacuous, principled or pliable, courageous or exquisitely house-trained around power. The size of a man’s bank account tells us remarkably little about the dimensions of his spine.

The question is therefore not whether Motsepe is rich. The question is what his public conduct tells us about his instincts when confronting power. Before Trump: flattery. Before Infantino: loyalty. Before an institution distributing enormous resources across African football: unanimity.

These are not the reflexes one looks for in the custodian of a constitutional democracy. A president must be capable of saying no to friends, billionaires, foreign presidents and powerful institutions, especially when doing so costs access, invitations, money and affection. South Africa does not need another leader whose moral compass appears to malfunction in the vicinity of concentrated power.

The wider African spectacle is more depressing still. A continent that has spent generations denouncing domination continues to produce elites desperate for invitations to the dominator’s table. The people receive the rhetoric. The elites receive the access. Then everyone gathers at the next congress and votes unanimously.

The colonial administrator would recognise the arrangement. He might merely be surprised that nobody has to order it anymore.

That is the obscenity at the centre of this episode. It is that 54 African football federations can apparently look at the same controversial record and not produce a single public dissenter, 54 organisations behaving less like custodians of African football than an applauding section arranged around a money trough.

Africa deserves better than this soft-bellied aristocracy of access: men rich in titles, allowances and international acquaintances and impoverished in the one currency public life cannot purchase.

Principle.

Patrice Motsepe may be an accomplished businessman. He may be personally generous. He may sincerely believe that cultivating powerful men benefits Africa. But Africa has had enough courtiers.

It has had enough elites whose nostrils become remarkably sensitive whenever the scent of money drifts through an international institution. It has had enough men who confuse being welcomed by power with representing those without it.

Motsepe himself recently said South Africa does not need him to enter politics.

For once, the billionaire has ventured to say what South Africa needs and may actually have gotten it right. South Africans should take him at his word.

Let us be unanimous.

* Ziyad Motala is a Professor of Law at Howard University School of Law.

** The views expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of IOL.