Most people in South Africa know me as a former Mamelodi Sundowns players because that is where I made name for myself.
But the truth is my stay at Mamelodi Sundowns was not completed because when I joined everything was good. Then I started having problems with the president at the time, Nastasha [Tsichlas]. If you are at a team, you must be happy and when you are not happy you cannot deliver on the field any more.
When I look back, I’m not happy with how things worked out at Sundowns and just the relationship with the management at the time didn’t work well. That had consequences in my delivery on the field.
So, I decided to leave the team in 2002 and I had many opportunities to come back to France or move to Sweden. But at the end of the day I went to Ukraine and joined a club called Metalist Kharkiv. I signed a two-year contract.
I moved to Ukraine because after Sundowns, I didn’t want to stay in South Africa. I preferred to go out of the country and an agent called me to see if I was interested to join Metalist. In my mind, I wanted to find something else. Kaizer Chiefs were interested but I had already made up my mind.
My stay in Ukraine was very difficult. People didn’t speak English; they speak their own language. Everything was different to what I was used and it was my first time going to Eastern Europe. And now that I think about it, it was not a very good idea to go there.
The culture and football were different – life and everything was different. And things got worse when I had an injury and I couldn’t finish my contract so I decided to move back to France and retire.
I didn’t have the passion to keep going and my decision to retire surprised everybody but I guess I had to take it.
I had to make the transition from playing football fulltime to retiring and it was not easy.
After that I started acting as an agent and I opened my own offices in France. I had an opportunity to bring Collins Mbesuma to France, at the time he was a top goal scorer at Kaizer Chiefs.
I had a French team that wanted to sign him but unfortunately the player decided to go to England where he joined Portsmouth. I spent a lot of money as an agent but the return to investment was not a lot.
It’s not easy being an agent. I lost more money as an agent. I had a big office in France with people working for me, I bought plane tickets for players. So, I decided to stop because I was losing money. It started being a little bit difficult.
After that I moved into the energy sector in Cameroon learning about the sector and public partnership with the state. That is how I moved into this business ten years ago. It’s a solar energy business to be more specific.