Madiba magic lost its lustre
Jon Swi
This country’s 2023 Rugby World Cup bid has come and gone as the French celebrate a victory that logically should never have been – but through the mists of depression which has descended on South African rugby followers, several things have become blindingly obvious.
It is significant that the traditional rugby powers – with the glaring exception of Scotland and England, who split their vote in the second ballot – swung South Africa’s way with the All Blacks, Australia and Wales behind us.
It is also clear that the “Madiba magic” former president Nelson Mandela wielded to help secure the 1995 World Cup – which was awarded rather than voted for – has lost its lustre. We are no longer a Rainbow Nation, just another corrupt, flyspeck African state located on the southern tip of the continent, laughing in the face of law and order and our much-vaunted democratic process, and leaving the world’s bankers running scared of a scarred and uncertain economy.
It is self-evident in the light of this that it was the pull of monetary rewards and a cynicism about South African government funding, sharpened by the Durban Commonwealth Games debacle, that swung it France’s way.
If World Rugby, the body nominally charged with safeguarding the sport’s well-being, is set on pursuing the expensive bid process, the game has tentatively embarked on a voyage fraught with precipices looming on every side.
For it’s precisely the process of bidding for the World Cup which has precipitated Fifa, soccer’s ruling body, into the legal whirlwind of a murky world of kickbacks, callow multimillion-dollar bribery and outright criminality, first exposed by US federal prosecutors in 2015.
While a Paraguayan court ruled in Asuncion that former South American soccer chief Nicolas Leoz could be extradited – subject to a medical report – to face trial in the United States over alleged bribery and money laundering, a pivotal case involving payoffs for television rights is being heard in New York with evidence of payments sent by wire transfer to Swiss bank accounts, or passed on as cash “in bags or envelopes” being led.
As a global spectacle, rugby cannot hope to match soccer, but the hypothesis of money being the moving force holds true. World Rugby – and the game itself – needs to tread extremely warily.