Togo did not qualify to play at this year’s Africa Cup of Nations. The tiny nation of 9 million people has only ever played at three editions of Africa’s biggest football event, the last time being 11 years ago in South Africa.
Last year, it finished third in a group that included Burkina Faso, Cape Verde, and Eswatini to miss out on Cote d’Ivoire 2023.
But Togo is playing a larger-than-life role in the boardroom ahead of the tournament’s kick-off in Abidjan on January 13. CAF president Patrice Motsepe called a deal with Togolese company New World TV “the biggest investment by a Pan-African broadcaster in CAF’s history” after the company won the rights for free-to-air and pay-TV English for sub-Saharan Africa in December. It includes all the competitions organised by CAF for national teams and clubs.
Even though the fee was not made public, CAF sees it as a justification for canceling some of its previous marketing deals. And it is why South African giants SuperSport has been frozen out.
SuperSport announced this week via a communique that it would not show the Afcon on its channels because it failed to secure the sub-license from New World TV. This move shocked the Anglophone part of the continent, where fans have come to expect the reliable South African broadcaster to show international football for several decades.
But watchers in Francophone Africa were not surprised because it was the same way New World TV outbid French company Canal+ for the FIFA World Cup rights in 2022. NWtv paid FIFA 15 million euros (15 billion naira) for the rights, a sum unheard of in the Francophone market. It employed analysts Emmanuel Adebayo, Basile Boli, Patrick Mboma and Wilfried Mbappe to work in its temporary Paris studios for the tournament.
To add to Canal+’s loss, NWtv has acquired Francophone media rights to the Euro 2024 and 2028, the FIFA Women’s World Cup 2023 and the UEFA Nations League.
Founded in 2015, New World TV has declared its mission to reduce the cost subscribers pay for watching content in its 16 markets. It sells its decoders for 5000 CFA Francs (7.61 euros, 8.34 dollars, 7610 naira) with a monthly subscription of 2500 CFA francs (3.81 euros, 4.17 dollars, 3805 naira).
This latest foray by NWtv into the English market is shaking up the market, turning it on its head after many years of dominance by SuperSport. Once the Kwese Sports and HiTV challenge was dead, SuperSport consolidated key rights like the Premier League, Champions League, and La Liga.
Could New World TV offer a long-term challenge, though?
“DSTV doesn’t throw money around,” said a source that I spoke to for this article. “The Afcon is only four weeks. It doesn’t make economic sense,” he said.
And that’s the fear that despite NWtv’s bold moves, their fate could end up like Kwese and others that have previously challenged SuperSport’s dominance.
When HiTV captured the Premier League pay TV rights for the Nigerian territory in the late 2000s, all Multichoice did was bide its time and focus on developing compelling entertainment content like Big Brother Nigeria and the Africa Magic channels that helped to keep its subscriber base intact. Soon enough, HiTV ran out of funding to secure the next round of Premier League rights and SuperSport swooped it back.
Likewise, when Kwese came into the market on the back of Strive Masiyiwa’s promise to show the Premier League to Africans for free. They soon ran out of funds as they failed to grow subscriber numbers.
SuperSport knows how to play the long game. New World TV has the Afcon for two cycles, 2023 and 2025. The test of their character and growth would be if they are able to keep the business running till then.
Togo is one of the poorest countries in Africa. Its 2023 estimated GDP of 9 billion dollars places it as the 39th country in Africa, much smaller than South Africa’s 380 billion dollars economy. So how does a country with that little wealth spend so much on sports rights? Where have the funds come from?
Togolese media reports indicate that Marc Adissou, a telecom engineer and owner of SKA Telecom, owns NWtv. The mysterious 47-year-old has no photos on the internet. SKA has traded in broadcasting and satellite equipment since 2014 when he registered the company in the UK alongside Rotimi Matthias Ibrahim and Olugbenga Omeiza Adebayo. Adebayo was removed as the company director in 2017.
New World TV’s public face is Nimonka Kolani, its managing director.
The company has said that no public money is involved in its operations. But it has shown closeness to the Togolese government, with President Faure Gnassingbe being a guest of honour at the 2022 FIFA World Cup final in Doha based on NWtv’s rights ownership. Gnassingbe granted an interview to the channel during primetime of the World Cup final where he praised their acquisition of the rights, stating: “I think that this is how football becomes more democratized in all its aspects, both sports and media. It is a global passion equally shared by everyone.”
Gnassingbe’s comments come across as political backing for NWtv’s muscling of the rights from Canal+, an African victory against a French behemoth that has controlled the market for many years. New World TV’s success represents a one-up against the former colonizers in a time of dwindling allegiance to France.
With its acquisition of the free-to-air rights for the Afcon, New World TV has usurped the role played by the Union of African Broadcasters (or URTNA of old). UAB was responsible for the acquisition of broadcast rights for African public broadcasters. Its last acquisition of the rights was in the 2019 and 2021 cycles. UAB’s members have struggled in recent years in the face of the increase in sports rights acquisition.
The growing influence of NWtv was brought to the fore a fortnight ago when CAF held a two-day workshop for 29 representatives of African public broadcasting organizations in Lome, the Togolese capital.
There they spelled out the limits of the broadcasters and what commercials they can carry to stay within the ambits of the law.
As it looks to stamp its profile on the African game, NWtv plans to broadcast Afcon 2023 in several languages, including English, Wolof, Lingala, Bambara, Ewe, Swahili, and Hausa. They say they want to give Africans the best experience in their languages, something the major broadcasters have failed to offer.
And with the diversity in the digital media space, NWtv hopes more Africans can access the Afcon via their mobile network providers across the continent, with matches to be made available on a pay-per-game basis.
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