Africa’s football governing body Confederation of African Football (CAF) have opened a new bidding process for next January’s African Nations Championship (CHAN) on Sunday, September 24, 2017.
This is sequel to Saturday’s decision of the executive body of CAF to strip Eastern African nation Kenya of the hosting right less than four months to the tournament.
Rising from its Executive Committee meeting at the Ghanaian capital Accra on Saturday, CAF’s Exco. overwhelmingly decided to withdraw the hosting rights of the tournament from Kenya due to what it termed “accumulation delays from reports of the various inspection missions” done in the country.
“With an overwhelming majority of the members present, it was decided to withdraw the hosting rights of the competition from Kenya in the light of accumulated delays from reports of the various inspection missions conducted in the country, the last of which took place from 11 to 17 September 2017.” read a CAF communique.
As reported earlier by www.aclsports.com, the Kenyan government had only recently released funds for major infrastructure works on two of the main centres that were expected to stage the tournament, a development CAF were not comfortable with.
With the tournament still to start as scheduled on January 12, 2018, the Confederation subsequently called for Federations willing to organize the biennial competition at a short notice to present their bids through the CAF Secretariat between September 24 and October 1, 2017.
Ethiopia, Cote d’Ivoire and Morocco had already expressed serious interest in hosting the tournament and are expected to turn out their bids during the bidding window.
CAF added in their communique that “the identity of the bidding countries will be disclosed within a maximum 15 days of the opening of the bidding process.”
Angola, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Congo, Coted’voire, Equatorial Guinea, Guinea, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco, Namibia, Nigeria, Sudan, Uganda and Zambia are the fifteen nations already qualified to play at the tournament.
