CAF Disciplinary Board v. Aden Marwa

Aden Range Marwa, a Kenyan chemistry teacher and assistant referee who had already officiated as a reserve official at the 2014 World Cup in Brazil, was set to become just the second Kenyan match official ever assigned to a FIFA World Cup, having secured leave from the Teachers Service Commission for an assignment at Russia 2018 worth an estimated Ksh 2.5 million. Days before the tournament, Ghanaian investigative journalist Anas Aremeyaw Anas released "Betraying the Game," a BBC documentary filmed during the 2018 African Nations Championship in Morocco, showing Marwa accepting a USD 600 payment in a hotel room in footage the documentary presented as a bribe to influence matches.

CAF removed Marwa from its list of World Cup officials before the tournament began, and its Disciplinary Board subsequently imposed a life ban on him from all football-related activity — the harshest sanction of the whole episode. Marwa's case sat alongside a wider wave of CAF discipline from the same period: eighteen African match officials were sanctioned within roughly a month, including a separate life ban for Ghanaian referee David Laryea and ten-year bans for six other Ghanaian officials, all tied to the same run of Anas Aremeyaw Anas investigations, one strand of which — a related documentary called "Number 12," focused specifically on Ghanaian football administration — separately implicated then-Ghana FA president and FIFA Council member Kwesi Nyantakyi accepting $65,000 on camera, a scandal that led Ghana's president to dissolve the entire Ghana Football Association.

Years later, Marwa publicly disputed the characterisation of the payment, saying Anas met him at a hotel and, at the end of their conversation, handed him money "to buy something for his family" back home, which Marwa maintains was never presented or intended as a bribe. He has also pointed out that some other officials implicated in the same wave of investigations, whose cases he considered to involve more concrete evidence, received five- or ten-year bans rather than a lifetime one, and has said he believes CAF specifically wanted him gone. These are Marwa's own, contested claims, made years after the fact, and CAF's life ban has not been overturned or reduced.

The case illustrates a distinct evidentiary pathway for football corruption cases compared to most matters in this library: rather than a federation complaint, a video-review dispute, or a post-match report, the sanction here rested on video evidence of a payment captured by investigative journalists working independently of CAF or FIFA — a method whose reliability Marwa himself has since challenged, even as the underlying disciplinary decision stands.