Domain: Sports Governance & Accountability
The accountability gap that hands Europe its easiest argument
Any case for redirecting more of football's money toward Africa has to survive one obvious counter: look what happened the last time you got money. That counter isn't manufactured by people who don't want Africa to have resources. It's sitting in the public record, generated by African football's own institutions — and if this series doesn't address it directly, everything argued in the first two pieces becomes easy to wave away.
So: the record, in full.
The presidency itself has already fallen to this
In November 2020, FIFA's ethics committee banned Ahmad Ahmad — the sitting president of the Confederation of African Football, a body representing 54 nations — from all football activity for five years. The finding: offering and accepting gifts and misappropriation of funds, including diversion of money during a pilgrimage to Mecca. He was fined 200,000 Swiss francs. This wasn't a junior administrator or a small national federation. This was the head of the entire continental body, at a moment when he already had the backing of 46 of CAF's 54 member associations for re-election.
Before the ban, CAF's own general secretary, Amr Fahmy, reported Ahmad to FIFA's ethics committee for alleged corruption and harassment — and was fired for it. A CAF executive committee member later went to the Court of Arbitration for Sport trying to force a forensic audit of CAF's finances, alleging the executive committee had agreed to one and Ahmad had stalled it. FIFA ultimately sent its own secretary general, Fatma Samoura, to oversee CAF directly as "general delegate for Africa" — an unusual step that amounted to a global body stepping in because a continental one couldn't govern itself.
More recently, a PwC forensic audit of CAF surfaced fresh concerns over financial irregularities in February 2026, and CAF's current deputy leader, Veron Mosengo-Omba, faced a Swiss preliminary criminal investigation into payments to his own bank accounts before prosecutors declined to pursue charges.
It isn't only at the top
Nigeria's House of Representatives voted in October 2025 to open a special investigative committee into the Nigerian Football Federation over more than $25 million in FIFA and CAF development grants received between 2015 and 2025. The immediate trigger was almost absurd: a $1.2 million grant meant to build a regional stadium in Birnin Kebbi produced a facility that went viral online for looking nothing like what the money should have bought, while Kenya's federation reportedly built a comparable facility for a fraction of the price. FIFA itself had flagged an earlier audit discrepancy in 2016, when $802,000 of a $1.1 million development grant went unaccounted for.
In the Republic of Congo, the outcome was more severe than an inquiry: the country's football federation president was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment — along with his wife, son, and two federation officials — for embezzling $1.3 million in FIFA development funds through money laundering and forgery.
In South Africa, investigative reporting has traced how the country's federation, SAFA, reached a point where it reportedly could not pay its own staff despite handling billions in sponsorship, broadcasting, and FIFA grant money — a collapse attributed not to one scandal but to a culture in which internal audits were reportedly ignored and procurement safeguards routinely bypassed, with allegations of financial mismanagement dismissed for years as politically motivated before forensic evidence finally forced action.
None of this is unique to one country. A 2020 Transparency International review of football governance found that Egypt was the only African football association that made its financial records accessible online — and that CAF itself had no code of ethics or ethics commission at the time. Ghana's federation leadership was toppled in 2018 after an investigative exposé revealed match-fixing and bribery. Kenya's federation has been dissolved and reconstituted repeatedly amid embezzlement allegations.
Why this matters for the argument, not just the ledger
It would be a mistake to read this as a reason to abandon the case made in the first two pieces of this series — that African football is structurally underweighted in who controls the sport's money, and that almost none of what does arrive is designed to reach a player's actual wage. Both of those things remain true regardless of what follows here.
But it would be an equal and opposite mistake to leave this part out. If the argument is "send more money, and send it more directly," the honest, necessary second half of that sentence is "and build the verification architecture that doesn't currently exist, because the last decade shows plainly what happens without it."
This is also why the direct-to-club, audited-payroll model proposed in the previous article isn't just a nicer idea than routing money through federations — it's the only version of this argument that survives contact with the record above. A Football Employment Fund that ran through the same federation structures implicated in Nigeria's $25 million probe or CAF's own presidency scandal wouldn't be a solution. It would be a bigger target.
There is a more recent, better sign worth naming honestly too: CAF under Patrice Motsepe has made real, visible motion toward reform — governance workshops for member associations across more than a dozen countries, public commitments to "governance, due process and transparency" repeated in nearly every statement CAF has issued through 2026, and a general secretary publicly describing the organization's prior culture as "toxic." Whether that reform outlasts the current leadership, or reaches the federation level where the worst failures above actually occurred, is the open question — and it is the question the next redirection of FIFA money should be built to answer, not assume.
Sources consulted: Al Jazeera, BBC Sport Africa, AllAfrica, SportBusiness, Transparency International, Play the Game (SAFA investigation), Nigeria Info FM, TheCable, Sahara Reporters, Premium Times, Guardian (Nigeria), and prior reporting on the CAF/Ahmad Ahmad ethics case, current as of August 20, 2026.