Why African teams performed badly at World Cup

You cannot, the old people love saying, amount to much if you are not “organized”. Today’s young people, especially our digital politicians and their laptop-carrying, tablet-toting acolytes and social media warriors, would do well to remember this little aphorism. Organization, it turns out, is everything.

There will have been no better illustration of the state of African organization, than the debacle of African teams at the football World Cup; that overrated, overpriced football spectacle that brings the entire earth to a standstill.

One goal

The World Cup is like a United Nations gathering: nations from all over the earth, each proud to have qualified for the finals, speaking a cacophony of languages, ostensibly united on one goal, to play football, but in actual fact having all manner of different objectives, from sex to spying.

No African country, save for the European outpost that is South Africa, can organize and host a World Cup tournament. African countries lack the money and the infrastructure, but, even if they had these, we simply do not have the organizational acumen required to run an event of that magnitude and not make a complete mess of it.

Some football wags even contend that the state of a country’s management can accurately be judged simply by looking at the state of its sports management bodies, and its sports stadia. A quick look at Kenya bears this point out, we have exactly one decent sports stadium, with another slowly crumbling away.

The two stadia are poorly managed, and are occasionally turned into either a refugee camp for alleged aliens, or into military parade grounds on national days. Both were built by the Chinese, on grants, and we have never developed the capacity to repair or even just maintain them.

The organizations that run them are corrupt, tribal edifices dominated by one or other kingpin, and notions of transparent elections and actual service to the sport are not allowed to get in the way of the gravy train. But perhaps the best demonstration of the state of African countries was the chaotic manner in which our teams bowed out of the tournament.

Bad government

Cameroon are said to have “thrown” all their matches: an Asian bookmaker predicted all the goals that Cameroon would concede, and which players would be sent off, weeks before the matches were played. Nigeria, ever a byword for chaos and corruption and perhaps the one country that best represents the stasis and unfulfilled potential of Africa, did not fail to disappoint.

Abundant energy

Handed a totally winnable path through the World Cup finals, the Nigerians somehow managed to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, their playing style characterized by abundant energy but very little evidence of thought or planning. Ghana have always flattered to deceive.

Long branded the best-run African country, with relatively modest corruption and little in the way of bad government, even their elections are quite clean, they looked like going furthest in the tournament, only to be felled by that perennial African weakness: individualism and greed.

Ghana’s players, brimming with talent and with a real chance of coming out tops, decided money was more important than football. One of them slapped his coach, and when the management sought to punish him, the others mutinied.

Ghana’s government had to fly cash to the players, $ 3 million, so the spoiled multi-millionaires could agree to play! Africa at the World Cup was just like Africa at home: greedy, corrupt, chaotic and a complete failure.