CAF A Licence Courses In SA Postponed

The CAF A Licence course that was supposed to have been conducted this month in South Africa has been postponed, SAFA Head of Coaching and Education, Frans Mogashoa has told the iDiski Times.

This is due to the CAF approval panel being away for the ongoing World Cup in Qatar, leading the licence course to be postponed for some time.

SAFA were ready, having sent all the documentation to the Confederation of African Football (CAF) that were required to host the CAF A Licence course.   

With this course very crucial to SA coaches, it is not clear when it will be held by SAFA as they will have to wait for CAF’s panels to approve it.

“The candidates who were interested in the course were informed about the postponement and there were no issues there,” said Magoshoa.

“SAFA CEO Tebogo Motlanthe who issued out the final indication to all the candidates is aware of this. So there is no issue as well.

“The reason why it was postponed, we submitted documents to CAF for them to approve it. We had no issues because it was the second time we sent documents, so there were no issues because we were filling in the gaps.

“But CAF indicated that their approval panels were at the World Cup, so it will take a long time for it to be approved to us. We said to them, please come back to us immediately because we have made preparations, we are ready, candidates have been admitted to the course, venues were booked but in the absence of such approval from CAF, we cannot go on.

“It is just that it is disappointing because people had planned for this since it was the time of the World Cup when they had time.”

The last time SAFA held its CAF A Licence course was in 2017, but according to SAFA – CAF A and B courses were not allowed in the whole of Africa and “SAFA did not sleep on duty”.

This led to SA coaches such as Eric Tinkler and Thabo Zondo being unable to bark instructions out from the sidelines in CAF competitions this season, with Mogashoa saying “this is anomaly must be rooted out once and for all”.

According to Mogashoa, SAFA have facilitators who were approved before such as Conte Kubhela, Fran Hilton-Smith, Steve Coetzee, himself, former SAFA TD and Bafana Bafana assistant coach Serame Letsoaka and CAF will normally send someone to do the assessment.

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There were question marks whether SAFA and their Technical Directors (spared Walter Steenbok in this case since he assumed the role two months ago), Mr Mogashoa as the Head of Education and Instructors, were unable to design content for CAF A, B licences, but Mogashoa, who was an interim SAFA TD following the departure of Neil Tovey, said this is not true.

“When the licences were introduced, CAF came up with its manuals and the manuals are there at SAFA House,” said Mogashoa.

“SAFA has been taking the lead in their own coaching education. We were doing Level 1 and Level 2 and those manuals were being upgraded.

“It doesn’t have to be manual per se. It is in the presentation of instructors who are integrating the new content from SAFA, from CAF and what SAFA had all along. It is not correct that there has been no content in the past five years.”

Story by Robin-Duke Madlala (@duke_robin).