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Sikhumbuzo Moyo, Senior Sports Reporter
CAF have asked South Africa to consider bidding to host the 2019 Total African Nations Cup after Cameroon was stripped of the right to host the event.

Speaking during the South African Football Association annual general meeting at Sandton, Johannesburg, yesterday, Safa president Danny Jordaan said they will be approaching the government before making an official bid.

Jordaan’s deputy who is also the Premier Soccer League chairman Irvin Khoza urged Safa to make the 2019 bid as it is important for South Africa to remain a major role player continentally and globally.

“Afcon will help in building influence and relevance,” said Khoza.

Zifa president Phillip Chiyangwa said his association will not even consider bidding to host the tournament as it has no infrastructural and financial prowess to host a tournament of such magnitude.

“You will need a lot of billions to play host to such a tournament and as a country we don’t have such a muscle at the moment so we won’t even bother considering such a move,” said Chiyangwa who is also the vice president of the Caf Africa Cup of Nations committee.

The decision to strip Cameroon of the right to host the event was taken after a special meeting of the Caf executive committee in Ghana, where the women’s African Cup was being played.

Caf president Ahmad, who goes by one name, said the move to take the tournament away from the Central African country was “a crucial and decisive moment for the good of African football.”

Those preparations have been criticised regularly since Cameroon won the right to host in 2014 but gained momentum in September when Caf, which had previously been unwilling to criticise the country publicly, said there was a “significant delay” with stadiums and other tournament-related infrastructure.

The African soccer body gave Cameroon a final chance by planning two more inspection visits in October.

One of those was to assess the security situation after an increase in violence in the southwest and northwest of the country involving English-speaking separatists and government forces.

There was a “horrific escalation of violence” in recent months in those regions, Amnesty International said.

Two cities due to host African Cup games, Limbe and Bafoussam, are deep in the regions where the fighting is.

Claiming they are being marginalised in the largely French-speaking country, the English-speaking, or Anglophone, separatists vowed to disrupt and even attack the African Cup if it went ahead.

In a thinly-veiled threat, they said soccer players, officials and fans may not be safe.

African Cup hosting has been a major headache for Caf, with the last four tournaments not held in the country they were initially awarded to.

South Africa stepped in for war-torn Libya in 2013, Equatorial Guinea replaced Morocco in 2015 and Gabon stood in for Libya, which again couldn’t host last year’s.

A new bidding process was opened with countries interested in hosting Africa’s top soccer tournament, which starts in just six months, invited to apply by the end of this month.

The African Cup is scheduled to be played from June 15 to July 13.