The SA Football Association (Safa) has managed to get the go-ahead from sport, arts and culture minister Gayton McKenzie to bid for next year’s Women’s Africa Cup of Nations (Wafcon) and 2031 Fifa Women's Cup.
McKenzie’s spokesperson Cassiday Rangata-Jacobs confirmed to the Sunday Times yesterday that the minister gave Safa the green light to bid for the events after the football governing body presented the bids to him in Cape Town last Sunday.
“The minister supports the bid[s] 100%,” was Rangata-Jacobs' response to the questions sent to him.
The gap for Safa to bid for next year’s Wafcon opened up after Morocco decided to pull out of hosting the event because they’re also hosting the men’s Africa Cup of Nations from December 21 2025 to January 18 2026.
If successful, Safa will host the Wafcon in less than 12 months, as it is scheduled for July 5 to July 26 next year. Banyana Banyana will be looking to defend the title they won for the first time in Morocco in 2022.
Speaking at the SABC offices on Thursday, where Safa extended its broadcast deal with SABC for another four years, Safa president Danny Jordaan was upbeat about the opportunities hosting the Wafcon would present to Banyana and the country as a whole.
Jordaan said the association had already submitted its bid to the Confederation of African Football (Caf) and would be waiting for their response. The Safa boss insisted hosting the events would go a long way to boosting the growth of women’s football in the country.
“It [Wafcon] was [initially] awarded to Morocco for 2024 but they moved it to July 2025. Then Caf took a decision that the men’s Afcon will also be hosted by Morocco, which means that within three months they’ll host men and women, and they decided to open up Wafcon for other countries. Caf has taken a decision to open for new calls which we said if you open it we’re going to make a bid,” said Jordaan.
On who will foot the bill for the event, especially Wafcon, at such short notice, Jordaan said the decision would be made once Caf had made its decision on the new hosts. “That’s what we have to discuss with Caf... it’s last minute. Depending on when they take the final decision, the sponsors [of Wafcon] will have less than a year to leverage. These are the issues we’re going to discuss with Caf.”
For Banyana to defend Wafcon at home, especially just after Safa renewed its broadcasting deal with the SABC, would be great, Jordaan added. “It will give Banyana a great opportunity to defend their title in front of our own people. The SABC will be free-to-air and that is what we can tell Caf, that we’ll have free-to-air to all of the matches and make the deal with the SABC on Wafcon.”
Both Safa and the SABC said their new deal will be complicated if it were to be defined solely in “rands and cents”, but are happy it included grassroots and school football.
“The SABC has an audience [on radio and television] of 26.6-million,” said SABC group CEO Nomsa Chabeli.
“No one offers that. There’s no other media owner in this country that offers that. That’s what we’re talking about in this partnership. It’s not about rands and cents. It’s about giving universal access to all South Africans to be part of this.”
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