Africa Cup of Nations 2010 - blog

Building a nation through football

by Paul Myers

Article published on the 2010-01-08 Latest update 2010-01-09 14:05 TU

Paul Myers reflects on what the Africa Cup of Nations means for its host country, Angola, in an exclusive blog for RFI from the 2010 CAN tournament.

Football tournaments have become nation-building exercises.

The cranes moving on the skyline are supposed to project somehow an image of dynamism and replenishment. The 2008 Africa Cup of Nations was awarded to Ghana eight years after it co-hosted with Nigeria to salute inter alia its democratic stability.

I arrived. I saw a nation’s roads being built. I got stuck in traffic jams in Accra, Kumasi and Sekondi.

Angola 2010 bears no resemblance to Angola 2000. And the subtext to this year’s competition is the unbridled pride of eight conflict-free years following nearly three decades of bloodshed.

For most of my life every time I saw a piece on Angola, it carried the adjunct ‘strife torn’ or ‘war ravaged’. It was a place to be avoided.

Since 2002 the phrase has been ‘formerly strife-torn’. Now the country is open. And this football show proves it.

Down in South Africa the impending World Cup is hermetically sealed in the nation-building capsule. Danny Jordaan, the charismatic head of the organising committee, has been at pains to emphasise this transcendance to the summer tournament. More so even than the fact that it’s the first time Africa is staging the 80-year-old competition.

The Angolan president José Eduardo Dos Santos is a keen football fan and under his watchful eye, the organisers have ensured that the four venues in Luanda, Benguela, Cabinda and Lubango have been completed on schedule.

He’s also eager for the country to give a good account of itself on and off the field.

As we go into the final weekend before the opening match in Luanda, I expect to see the cranes static and the people out on the streets powering the putative renaissance.

But that energy of the masses won’t be able to hide the inefficiencies at the heart of inviting people to observe all the reconstruction.

Hosting a tournament should, at the very least, highlight a tradition of competence.

For example, you don’t get loads of foreign journalists to fill out reams of forms at home so they can get a visa and accreditation and then tell them when they get to the accreditation centre 10 kilometres outside Luanda that they have to come back later because the computer files have been lost.

Meanwhile, officials from the African Football Confederation shuffle their well fortified frames a few minutes from their 600-dollar-a-night five-star hotel to their heavily staffed accreditation centre and get their badges.

You can either bristle at the good fortune or ask the question why have a party when you’re not patently not in a position to host it?

Nation building isn’t an excuse for guests to suspend their judgment. I suspect the concept is being harnessed by the apparatchiks and vested interests to usher in another tranche of injustice and division.

The people living in the hills sweeping down to Luanda Bay will probably never know of such administrative logjams at the accreditation centres. They might not even care.

The optimist in me rather hopes they do. Gurgling oil fields can finance an array of gleaming skyscrapers and roads, peace in our times is a welcome lullaby too.

But if there’s no intellectual capacity to transform those windfalls into sustained common good?

What kind of nation will that be?