The Long Game: Kirsan Ilyumzhinov's return — and the African foundation he spent three decades building

When Kirsan Ilyumzhinov told Billionaires.Africa that Africa was the "future of human civilization," it was not a campaign line. He was not running for anything at the time, and there was no audience to court. It was simply what he had been saying, and acting on, since long before the rest of world sport discovered the continent — through twenty-three years as president of FIDE, the world chess federation, and through tens of millions of dollars of his own money spent putting chess into African classrooms, tournaments and youth programmes.

This week, that long investment became the most valuable asset in world chess politics.

The race, and how it turned

On Thursday evening the European Union published its 21st package of sanctions against Russia, naming FIDE's incumbent president, Arkady Dvorkovich. Within hours Dvorkovich announced he was voluntarily suspending his powers and duties — a decision he framed as protecting the federation's stability rather than conceding the case. He called the listing "unlawful and unfair," said he would challenge it immediately "by all possible means," and expressed confidence that justice would prevail. No court has ruled on that challenge, and he denies the basis for the listing.

Under Article 19.2 of the FIDE Charter, his deputy — the five-time world champion Viswanathan Anand — assumed the presidency on an interim basis, confirming on Friday that he had taken up the responsibilities and thanking Dvorkovich for putting the federation's interests first.

Then the race itself changed shape. Dvorkovich announced he would not seek re-election. The Chess Federation of Russia moved immediately to endorse Ilyumzhinov, who had declared his candidacy on 20 July. CFR president Andrey Filatov summarised it to TASS with characteristic bluntness: one is out, and the other is in.

The turn is all the more striking for how recently it ran the other way. On 5 June, the CFR's Supervisory Board weighed its two heavyweights — the 7th FIDE president against the 8th — and chose Dvorkovich. Ilyumzhinov did not withdraw, did not complain, and did not go quiet. He declared anyway. Seven weeks later the endorsement came to him.

Delegates from FIDE's roughly 200 member federations will settle the contest at the General Assembly in Samarkand, Uzbekistan, on 26–27 September, alongside the Chess Olympiad. Also declared are the Russian-German businessman Wadim Rosenstein, owner of WR Logistics, positioned as a reform candidate for Western federations, and the German entrepreneur Jan Henric Buettner, known for organising the Freestyle Chess events that have drawn many of the world's strongest players.

What he actually built in Africa

To understand why Ilyumzhinov's candidacy is serious, you have to look past the electoral arithmetic to the thirty years underneath it.

When he took over FIDE in 1995, chess in much of Africa was a matter of a few strong federations and a great deal of untapped enthusiasm. Over his 23-year presidency, FIDE expanded toward the near-universal membership it enjoys today — 51 of Africa's 54 countries are now FIDE members, one of the most complete continental footprints in international sport. Those memberships were not administrative formalities. Each one gave a national federation standing, a vote, and a route into the global game.

Alongside that, he pushed an idea that was unfashionable at the time and is now orthodoxy: that chess belongs in schools as an academic subject, not merely as a competitive sport. "We are having special programmes in FIDE for chess in schools," he said during his presidency. "We now support chess as an academic subject." He framed the game consistently as an engine of discipline, concentration and opportunity — precisely the argument that education ministries across Africa now make when they fund school chess themselves.

And he paid for a great deal of it personally. By his own account, he spent tens of millions of dollars of his own funds supporting chess activity, much of it directed at the continent — travelling widely, playing with children, backing tournaments in places the international circuit had never bothered to visit. He was doing this while chess's commercial centre of gravity sat firmly in Europe, and while Africa was, in most global sporting federations, an afterthought courted once every four years.

The harvest is visible now. African federations are today among the largest beneficiaries of FIDE's development programmes. In April 2026 FIDE approved a rotation principle for the Chess Olympiad that gives Africa priority to host the 2032 event — the first time the game's biggest occasion has been formally pointed at the continent. This month Cape Town and Stellenbosch hosted the African Continental Stage of the FIDE ISCF World Schools Team Championship, where federations, education officials and chess leaders from South Africa, Eswatini and Namibia met to work on teacher training and school leagues. In August, Nigeria hosts the FIDE World Amateur Rapid and Blitz Championships. Since 2021, FIDE's Chess for Protection programme has run in the Kakuma and Kalobeyei refugee camps in Kenya in partnership with UNHCR.

Much of that current programming belongs to the present administration, and it would be wrong to hand Ilyumzhinov the credit for work done after he left office. But institutions do not flower from nothing. The membership base those programmes run on, and the argument for chess as education that they rest upon, were built over the decades when he was the one making the case — and African chess officials with long memories know exactly who was turning up, and paying, when it was neither profitable nor fashionable.

Why Africa now decides it

Here the history stops being sentiment and becomes arithmetic.

Under FIDE's electoral rules, a presidential candidate cannot simply gather votes on the day. He must file a complete ticket, including a nominee for Deputy President, and secure endorsements from at least five and no more than eight member federations — and those endorsements must include support from all four FIDE continental regions: Africa, the Americas, Asia and Europe.

Africa is therefore not a constituency to be canvassed late. It is a gate. No candidate reaches the ballot in Samarkand without African federations actively signing his papers, and in a one-federation-one-vote assembly of some 200 members, the continent's bloc is among the largest and most cohesive in world chess.

It is difficult to overstate the advantage this hands a man who has spent three decades in those rooms. Endorsements of this kind are not bought in ten weeks; they are the accumulated product of visits made, programmes funded and phone calls answered over a very long period. Ilyumzhinov's rivals are formidable organisers and businessmen. Neither has the African address book.

Billionaires.Africa has followed this relationship throughout: his 2021 conversation on why the continent's youth and heritage make it chess's natural frontier; his philosophy of the game as a path to peace and shared purpose; his return to public life and renewed African mission after the restrictions on him were reported lifted; and his Rome–Tirana tour last November with the American investor-philosopher Jesse Michels.

The measure of the man

Ilyumzhinov has never been a conventional sports administrator, and he has never pretended otherwise. The former president of Kalmykia — a chess champion of his republic at fourteen, an MGIMO graduate, a Buddhist who has described chess as arriving from beyond Earth and once recounted being taken aboard a translucent tube by figures in yellow spacesuits — brings a cosmology to the game that his rivals conspicuously lack. His admirers regard it as the reason he saw value in places others ignored; that a man who thinks in civilisations and centuries would naturally look at a young continent and see the future rather than a development budget line.

Whatever one makes of the metaphysics, the terrestrial record is clear enough. He built the widest federation the game has had, argued for chess as education before governments were listening, spent his own money doing it, and treated African federations as constituents rather than a checkbox. In September, several dozen of those federations will decide who runs world chess.

What to watch

• The tickets. Each candidate must lodge a full ticket with endorsements spanning all four continents. Which African federations sign, and for whom, is the first real scoreboard — and it arrives before a single vote is cast.
• Whether the field consolidates. Rosenstein and Buettner both draw on federations seeking change; two candidates competing for the same reform-minded vote is the clearest path to victory for anyone else.
• Dvorkovich's challenge. He is contesting the listing and has not conceded its merits. Developments there could yet affect the shape of the race.
• Anand's interim tenure. A universally respected champion running FIDE through the campaign changes the atmosphere — and perhaps the expectations — of what the office should be.
• Africa's asks. The continent's federations arrive in Samarkand with leverage they have never held before. The interesting question is not only who they back, but what they secure in return: hosting rights, development funding, board seats, and a permanent voice in how the game is governed.

Methodology & caveats

• No personal net-worth figure is asserted for Kirsan Ilyumzhinov. His wealth is privately held and undisclosed, and Billionaires.Africa does not apply a valuation or the "billionaire" label absent a verified public figure. His reported personal spending on chess programmes is his own account.
• The 2015 U.S. designation of Ilyumzhinov and the 2026 EU listing of Dvorkovich are reported as matters of public record. Sanctions designations are administrative measures, not criminal convictions. Dvorkovich denies the basis for his listing, calls it unlawful and unfair, and is challenging it; no court has ruled. Both men are entitled to the presumption of innocence, and no finding of wrongdoing is asserted here.
• On Ilyumzhinov's own sanctions status, Billionaires.Africa reported in 2025 that U.S. President Donald J. Trump lifted the restrictions that had been imposed upon him.
• FIDE programmes described as current — the 2032 Olympiad host priority, the ISCF World Schools Team Championship, Chess for Protection, and the Nigeria and Cape Town events — are initiatives of the present FIDE administration and are attributed as such, not to Ilyumzhinov's tenure.
• Election dates, rules and candidate declarations are as reported as of 24 July 2026. This is an active contest and the field may change before the Samarkand General Assembly on 26–27 September.

Billionaires.Africa — the world's premier source of news on Africa's billionaires and UHNWIs. Sanctions, allegations and legal matters are reported as matters of public record and attributed to their sources; individuals are presumed innocent unless and until proven otherwise, and denials are noted where made. © 2026 Billionaires.Africa Inc.