INDICT THE AFRICAN GOVERNMENTS IN THE HALL OF SHAM & SHAME

"African governments are 99% responsible for the thriving business of trafficking and exploitation of 15,000 Young African footballers".

In Africa Football can fulfill the desires of a young boy and his family to escape poverty, many are inspired by the players such as, Liverpool’s duo of Egypt`s, Mo Salah, and Senegal`s Mane that they regularly see on TV. They learn of the wealth associated with international football stars, coming to believe that a career in football is a way out of destitution. However, little do they know the whole dirty secrets and irregular activities associated with the beautiful game of football, Michel Platini was very assertive in this statement which describes the filth in the game “What else do you call a phenomenon whereby children aged 12 or 13 are torn away from their environment and culture to join a business in return for payment? “This is happening in football!

In Eric Dodd’s opening remarks in the Time magazine a published report he notes” Every four years, the World Cup draws unparalleled attention to soccer and its stars — the “beautiful game” played on its grandest stage for all to see. Far less attention is minded to those whose passion for the game has led to their exploitation”.

In this article, I have endeavored to reproduce personal accounts of victims who have been exploited through irregular channels and well documented facts about inter- governmental complicity in the trade of scouting of young talent from the African continent. 

Real-life stories

Dayo, a Nigerian soccer player living in Turkey, sits for a portrait inside the second floor of the run-down Feriköy Pitch in Istanbul

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The impoverished family of Dayo a Nigerian talented soccer player parted with a fee in excess of $5,000 to be trafficked from Nigeria to Istanbul by an assortment of scouts and unlicensed agents. This under-informed and uneducated youth was lured into this scam with a promise of becoming the next Samuel Eto one of the pristine African soccer export to Europe —But instead of using his time in Turkey to kickstart a successful soccer career in top-tier European leagues, he was abandoned shortly after his arrival and forced to fend for himself in a harsh and unforgiving land.

Aloys Nong, a Cameroonian footballer went through a similar situation. A so-called agent “discovered” him and convinced him to fly to Europe to pursue a career as a professional footballer. Nong, along with eight other boys, slept in a family’s living room. They were not allowed in the apartment during the day. “It was January, it was cold outside, and we didn’t have warm clothes,” he said. The boys often went hungry. “We would go to the supermarket and would eat there. The guard would turn a blind eye if we didn’t take anything out of the store. “A year later, Nong and the boys were kicked out of the apartment. 

Government agencies

Qatar national football team

The humanitarian problem of trafficking through football is not exclusively or isolated to private and unlicensed agents profiting from human aspiration but wealthy nations and inter-governmental agencies and local based sports administrators are heavily implicated in the scheme of this heinous modern-day slavery. Take the historical precedent from Qatar who won the bid to host the 2022 World Cup, the country has had a discreet policy agenda of naturalizing quite a few foreign players from Africa and South America. When the country surprisingly won the 2006 Asian Games, its best players were an Uruguayan striker, a Senegalese defender, and a Senegalese goalkeeper and it is inconceivable that Qatar’s team for the 2022 World Cup, will not include a significant number of naturalized previously trafficked young African players on the squad.

Spearheading this agenda is one of the world’s richest man, Sheikh Jassim Bin Hamad Al Thani, heir to Qatar’s throne at the time, and to continue with this discreet policy agenda he hired the services of a Spanish scout, Josep Colomer, who helped launch the career of one of the greatest players in history, Lionel Messi. Colomer,, was convinced he could find the players Sheikh Jassim needed in Africa, a continent with a billion people wild about football.

With Qatar’s backing, Colomer launched Football Dreams in 2007 and over the course of the next decade held tryouts mostly in Africa, looking for potential superstars. Before launching Football Dreams, Josep Colomer spent months traveling across Africa to set up the vast network of nearly 6,000 local staff needed to carry out the project. That is the same number of people needed to operate an aircraft carrier. During the first year of Football Dreams, Colomer and his team scouted over 400,000 13-year-old boys in seven African countries by holding over 26,000 games at nearly 600 fields, many of them nothing more than rough patches of dirt.

At each field, local organizers registered 800 kids for the tryouts. Many of these organizers were local coaches who ran the thousands of small, informal football schools that dot neighborhoods across Africa. To enlist their support, Colomer and his team distributed thousands of dollars of free Nike gear at each of the fields where they held tryouts. Volunteers were also given a free trip to Doha if one of their boys was selected for the final tryout, a big perk since many had never traveled outside their countries before. 

To spur the players’ development, Qatar also bought a small club in Belgium that could serve as a farm team for the Football Dreams kids and prepare them to play at Europe’s biggest clubs. The residents of Eupen, a town of only 20,000 people, woke up one day to discover that their local team, the Pandas, was now owned by an Arab country they knew little about and filled with African teenagers. That did not go down well with everyone.

Again, I find it incomprehensible that such a grand operation involving thousands of personal school’s football academies, sports association, and local administration would happen without the express knowledge and the approval of the African governments; In a few researchers Akindes, and Kirwin points out in his research paper “This type of exploitation of kids and soccer in Africa does have historical roots. Africa has been conquered countless times by countries looking to use it for the natural resources it provides as well as for the human labor found there in 1502 the Portuguese built one of the first slave trading posts in Africa.

Therefore, these incubators set up by Colomer and facilitated by Qatar`s oil money across Africa with the full knowledge of African regimes act as the modern times trading posts and open market slave stalls reminiscent of the dark ages of the slave trade.

  

To solve this modern enslavement of African youth sports talents, I advocate first for all the stakeholders to accept the shared responsibility and come out clean and secondly introduce humane regulations which are focused on prevention of the trade rather then the FIFA`s knee jerk reactive policy agenda which commodifies African young sports talents like pieces of raw materials. For instance, regulations which refer to a player transfer as ‘Ethical Transfer Charter’ is disrespectful and inhumane. The Ethical Transfer Charter operates in a manner akin to fair trade agreements for products such as coffee and diamonds, as clubs that sign up would agree to only sign minors who had been ‘ethically sourced.’ In fact, I ran a 7-day deliberate provocative poll on a social media site LinkedIn to gauge the public reaction to this and the result was nobody wanted to be part of the poll.

 

For more resources and research into this humanitarian problem use the or the WhatsApp broadcast number listed in the graphics.

 

Moses Atocon

Is a Content Creator with a Specialization in diversity targeted marketing and is passionate about the study of fusion of the field of culture and A. I technology?