Tanzania Football Federation boss Wallace Karia has explained how bidding together for both CHAN 2024 and AFCON 2027 has affected East Africa’s plans for the two tournaments.
Tanzania Football Federation boss Wallace Karia has opened up on some of the challenges that come with jointly bidding together to host the 2024 African Nations Championships and 2027 Africa Cup of Nations.
Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania will co-host both CHAN 2024 and AFCON 2027 but the former has been postponed from February to August owing to a lack of preparedness in the region and also the congested calendar.
There has been a blame game over which country was not ready, leading to the change of dates, with Kenya particularly behind schedule in terms of stadia upgrade while the other nations were cited for not having the requisite accommodation and transport in place.
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Fans were eagerly anticipating for the upcoming CHAN 2024 tournament which was originally supposed to take place in February, but CAF have decided to postpone it.
Karia says those are some of the challenges they have to face as if one country is ready and another one is not, all of them will be affected but hopes that it will not be the case when it comes to AFCON 2027.
“Tanzania was ready but we have some issues, this bid was a ‘Pamoja bid’ and you cannot say another one is not ready,” said Karia.
“It is Pamoja and it means together, therefore, anything not ready in any of the countries affects all three countries.
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FKF vice president McDonald Mariga has shared how he feels Harambee Stars can ensure they qualify from their tough CHAN 2024 group that has Morocco, Angola, DRC and Zambia.
“We only had a three-month window to prepare when we were given CHAN and we could not say no because when we were bidding for AFCON 2027, we said we could also host CHAN but we thought maybe it could be CHAN 2026 but we had a backlog of 2024.”
Karia says he was not impressed by reports that Kenya could lose the CHAN hosting rights because that would also have affected the other nations.
“All these three countries are in CECAFA and that is why I was saddened to read in the Kenyan media that Kenya would lose it. Kenya could not lose it because if it goes, all of us lose. I travelled day and night in all three countries to ensure infrastructure is good,” said Karia, who is also the CECAFA boss.
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The Kenyan government has been urged to take advantage of the CHAN postponement to fast-track renovation work at Kasarani and Nyayo.
“Playing in February was a big risk for our leagues, we have World Cup qualifiers in March and we have our teams in the CAF inter-club competitions.”
