Ivoire
CAF president launches pan-African inter-school championship with own $10 million
The South African billionaire and president of the Confederation of African Football (CAF), Patrice Motsepe, on Tuesday in Abidjan announced that he will personally finance the pan-African inter-school football championship, which will be launched “between 2022 and 2023”, in collaboration with FIFA. The donation will amount to US$ 10 million and will come from the foundation that bears his name. On a visit to Côte d’Ivoire, the CAF president recalled that the future competition will concern boys and girls aged between 12 to 14 years and will take place “first at national level via national associations, then at zonal level with the organization of six regional tournaments which will serve as qualifying rounds for the final tournament”, according to CAF’s governing body. Initially, pilot na...
Nigerian government receives stolen Ile-Ife artefact from Mexico
The Minister of Foreign Affairs, Chief Geoffrey Onyeama, on Thursday in Abuja received a stolen Ile-Ife artefact recovered from Mexico. Receiving the artefact, he called for a more secured border to prevent future occurrence of theft. Onyeama collected the artefact from Dr Yakubu Dadu, Charge d’Affaires of the Nigerian Mission in Mexico. The minister hailed the Embassy’s efforts in recovering the artefact. He said that the interventions of Nigerian Envoys in recovering stolen possessions of the country shows the important works they were doing as against negative reports of Nigerian missions on social media. Onyeama also appreciated the government of Mexico for its cooperation in ensuring that the artefact was duly returned to Nigeria. He however stressed the need for sensitising Customs o...
West African health ministers in joint fight against Ebola
Ministers of Health from Guinea – which is combating a new Ebola outbreak – and neighbouring countries have agreed on a unified front to combat the virus that re-emerged about three weeks ago. A UN statement on Wednesday said this was at a meeting held in Guinea’s capital, Conakry, on 2 March. Ministers and government representatives from Cote d’Ivoire, Guinea-Bissau, Liberia, Mali, Senegal and Sierra Leone attended the inter-ministerial meeting. “If in 2014 Guinea and the neighbouring countries were victims of Ebola, this time around Guinea and the region are resolutely facing up to Ebola,” said the Guinean Prime Minister, Dr. Ibrahima Kassory Fofana. The statement said the ministers agreed in a final declaration to set up a coordination mechanism, enhance cross-border collaboration, incl...
AFCON: Golden Eaglets fail MRI test three weeks to kick-off
In another embarrassing age-related moment for Nigerian football, 40 out of the 60 boys pencilled down as part of the Golden Eaglets contingent to prosecute the Under-17 African Cup of Nations (AFCON) qualifiers in Benin Republic failed the mandatory Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) age test. Coming just three weeks to the qualifiers, this means the coaching crew will have to race against the clock to pick a squad qualified enough to represent the country at the West African Football Union (WAFU) Group B qualifiers billed to kick-off on Tuesday, January 5. Out of the 20 players who passed the tests, only five of them are part of the main squad and just two of the five are included in coach Fatai Amoo’s preferred starting lineup for the competition. Most of the players the coach banked on d...
