The President of the South African Football Association (SAFA) Dr. Danny Jordaan has made an announcement ahead of the upcoming 2025 Africa Cup of Nations qualifiers.
SAFA called a media press conference on Wednesday at the SAFA House headquarters in Nasrec, with the FA Presidents of Malawi (Fleetwood Haiya), eSwatini (Peter Simelane), Zambia (Andrew Kamanga) and Botswana (Tariq Babitseng).
Jordaan’s vice presidents, Bennet Bailey, Linda Zwane and Chief Executive Officer Lydia Monyepao were also in attendance as they announced their endorsement of Dr. Patrice Motsepe to run for a second term as President of the Confederation of African Football.
“It’s election season and in this period, we start with the elections of CAF and FIFA which is in March, then later in 2025, we have SAFA regional elections, 52 regions have elections and then in 2026 SAFA national elections,” Jordaan said.
“I’ve spoken to all the presidents in the region, some of them cannot be here, but did send messages of support and we want to explain why we are supporting the name of Dr Patrice Motsepe. We did so the first time he served a term and now it’s the second term he is going for.
“From our perspective and they will all give their own perspective, there has been significant improvement in CAF, not just from a financial point of view, because often we only look at the financial aspect, but also from a football point of view, we have now the CAF Schools competition, the U20 Championship, Cosafa Men’s and Women’s that’s on now.”
He added: “This pattern is replicated all over the continent, it’s an explosion of football and when we see the CAF awards and nominations, you see what we’re talking about. Football has shown exponential growth under the leadership of Patrice Motsepe.
“From a CAF perspective, it started off with a huge deficit [financially], Andrew Kamanga, the vice-chairman of the finance committee made a report to the CAF congress and Adis Ababa recently and he can detail how that recovery happened. But simple to say, the most successful AFCON, financially was the recent one in Ivory Coast.
“It was a huge success, in terms of television, viewership, revenue, ticket sales, global reach, everything. Just phenomenal. So given the background and the achievement over the period of his term, we thought it’s best for us to endorse Patrice Motsepe again for a second term and we hope and believe this will bring even more success to African football.”
Motsepe has agreed to stand as a candidate at the CAF Presidential Elections scheduled for March 2025, which is gathering massive support in the Southern and Eastern regions of the continent thus far.
