What exactly does Morocco want from us?

Any attempt to do a post-mortem of the 2025 AFCON concluded last weekend in Rabat, Morocco, will always reopen all sorts of old footballing wounds. These old wounds were from injuries inflicted on Africans by fellow Africans, assailants of the same football fraternity. They are mostly inflicted by the off-pitch activities of football authorities and football clubs of North African extraction. Recall that Enyimba FC of Aba did not have the privilege of formally receiving the first of the back-to-back CAF Champions League trophies they won in 2003 and 2004 because of stadium violence in Ismailia, Egypt. The euphoria of that victory covers the pain, but the pain was inflicted. It is an old wound because with what happened at the stadium, the Egyptians denied the Nigerians that opportunity of receiving the trophy like other champions. Egypt did that!

Many times, our Arab-African compatriots make you want to puke when you ponder on the extent they go – on and off the pitch to win football games. You remember that Libyan authorities – football and otherwise – didn’t mind that Nigeria’s Super Eagles might perish when they withdrew the landing permit granted their plane to land in Benghazi? Do you still recall that their plane was diverted midair to a disused remote Al Abraq airport without navigational facilities, where they were locked-in for 15 hours? This was as recent as October 2024! What do you think was the intention of Libya even as the Tunisian pilot told them he didn’t have the amount of fuel required to fly to where they diverted their flight?

What if there hadn’t been an internet connection to a certain point during their ordeal? It would simply have been the word of the Nigerian team and officials against those of the Libyans. Also, recall that it took international pressure for the Libyans to yield and grudgingly allow the plane to refuel for the Eagles to fly back home. You made a delegation of a visiting senior national football team and officials to land at an old, discarded airport, and you detained them there without food, water, and internet or phone connection for about 15 hours all because you want to win a football match?! Libya!

On December 20, last year, the Captain of Nigeria’s Super Eagles, Wilfred Ndidi, told of their desire to wipe the tears Nigerians cried from their missing out on the 2026 FIFA World Cup by winning the African Cup of Nations (AFCON). He said he and the other players in the team had targetted the AFCON to compensate for the World Cup miss. “It was a sad one missing out on the World Cup, but the AFCON is another opportunity to correct the wrongs, put smiles on the faces of Nigerians and make the country proud once again,” Ndidi said in an interview.

He saw an opportunity for the Super Eagles and we all agree that they pushed hard for the win. It has now turned out to look like while they were focused on playing football to win, Morocco, the host nation of AFCON 2025 was planning way beyond that. The country and its football administrators had planned to cause all sorts of trouble for any team that would want to stand in their way with robust football. There is no denying them the opportunity of lifting the AFCON trophy after fifty years. The Moroccans had added all kinds of spices to their preparations and went to such unexpected details as recruiting a number of goalkeepers’ towels thieves.

The Confederation of African Football (CAF) has a lot of work to do. CAF mustn’t necessarily start by explaining whose ‘unacceptable conduct’ the confederation finds unacceptable. That would be for later consideration. The African football governing body must look wholesale into how much mental and physical agony our North African compatriots have caused us all. Look at cases made by different club sides and look at the way these had been treated. That would lay the foundation to curb whatever excesses CAF finds in the way these North Africans behave when it comes to football.

READ ALSO: How do you feel about the Nigeria vs Morocco AFCON match?

There were numerous unacceptable conducts seen during the AFCON final match between Senegal and Morocco. There were unacceptable conducts also during the semi-final match between Nigeria and Morocco. The unacceptable conducts CAF allows or punishes have the capacity to determine what would become of African football under its care in the near future. There was a semi-final match between Egypt and Senegal. Before then, there had been a quarter-final match between Algeria and Nigeria and the one between Morocco and Cameroon.

Results of some of the activities that tainted these games in the tournament have been released. One of such results is the case of a certain Samuel Eto’o Fils of the Cameroonian Football Federation (FECAFOOT). The sanctions against Eto’o were announced promptly, but FECAFOOT said they are still waiting to hear from CAF the official reasons for the Eto’o punishment. The instant punishment meted out to Eto’o could surely have curtailed Nigerians from any form of unofficial engagement of the erring Moroccans. It is like tying people’s hands and tongues in the face of oppression. 

Senegalese goalkeeper Yehvann Diouf needed to employ Greco-Roman wrestling skills to stop Moroccan match officials – called ball boys – from stealing their goalkeeper, Edouard Mendy’s towel. What if YehvannDiouf was a temperamental person? He might have hit those boys and given us another “unacceptable conduct”. Nigeria’s Stanley Nwabali didn’t have a tag-team member like Diouf that could wrestle his own towel from the Moroccans. The towel-stealing episodes happened twice, and perhaps it might have been more but there was no attention paid to the earlier games involving Morocco. Would CAF deny that the members of Nigerian Football Supporters Club were not deliberately scattered around the stadium during the semi-final match? If this act was not deliberate, then it is curious. The country allowed that to happen in matches that were beamed to the whole world, unmindful of the fact that one destroys one’s bottom with such minute farts.

CAF is still furious. In fact, it is still angry at the events which badly coloured the AFCON final match in Rabat. But if CAF was curious, it would cast even if it is a mere glance at the numerous things that detracted from the successes it achieved in Cote d’Ivoire, for which it was widely acclaimed just two years ago. Why are people not angry that Ivory Coast defeated Nigeria to win the final in Abidjan? Why is there no backlash like we are having it now? It is simply because they won fairly without employing dirty, underhanded antics to aid their ascendancy.

Infrastructure is good. Building for the future is fantastic, indeed it is one of the best ways to develop the game. People were happy in Morocco because they got their money’s worth there. The country has done well for African football. However, their obvious win-at-all-costs attitude – a common trait among the Arab-Africans was a put-off. If the entire infrastructure built is not used with sincerity and respect for other users, it would always amount to what the world witnessed in Morocco. Now, the country has lost all the goodwill it got in the 2022 FIFA World Cup in Qatar.

It is surely going to be a different kettle of fish for the country in the coming FIFA World Cup. People will remember that Morocco denounced their Africanness when they were hailed as the first African country to reach the semi-finals of the FIFA World Cup. It is not the first time they would seek to leave Africa. CAF might also need to sit down with them and ask them exactly what they want. These Moroccans are neither bird nor rat, and if there are real Africans among the Moroccans, please, they should stand up. Let the towel-stealing Moroccans please excuse us.