UNEMBARGOED
SO THE Fifa corruption scandal just won’t go away. It’s a problem because it will get worse, much worse, for a lot of people across the globe. Unlike in SA, no one is going to suspend Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) director James Comey or US attorney-general Loretta Lynch and give them a handsome golden handshake to disappear into the California sunset.
That means one of two things will happen. Either Jack Warner, the erstwhile former Fifa vice-president, will stand trial, during which he will mount a desperate bid to stay out of federal prison or he will, I hope, also sing and tell the world what Sepp Blatter knew and got up to. He’s already threatened to collapse the cathedral. Either way, it’s going to be awkward for SA because we are right in the middle of the soup and it keeps getting hotter.
Instead of a measured response to an unfolding credibility crisis, SA’s football authorities and politicians did what they know best, issuing flat denials buttressed by conspiracy theories. It didn’t work. Skeletons kept tumbling out of the closet, revealing what could be the most embarrassing corruption scandal in years.
The Fifa system is corrupt. It has been for a long time. It is highly unlikely that any country that hosted the World Cup in recent memory did not have to grease palms in some or other way, including the US in 1994. France, South Korea, Japan and Germany were all dealing with the same corrupt system and anyone who believes they managed to secure hosting rights without back-handers is naive.
The US indictment of Warner and others says the racket has lasted for 24 years, which takes us to 1991. In a way, this is less about Chuck Blazer, Jack Warner and the other characters in the indictment and more about how the most popular game in the universe has been hijacked by arrogant powermongers and turned into a thriving criminal enterprise.
The pyramid had to collapse at some point and it took Blazer’s arrogance in living a lavish lifestyle that attracted US tax authorities. Now we sit with a huge problem with potentially serious political implications. Here’s why.
If Warner admits to asking for or getting a bribe from SA in exchange for his and other colleagues’ votes, or is convicted of this, then it means the $10m was a bribe for which someone in SA needs to account. In any case, interpretation of local legislation by a highly respected senior advocate says there should at least be a criminal investigation for which a slew of officials could go to jail if convicted.
If Warner is convicted then everyone in the chain of decision-making in the Local Organising Committee (LOC), the South African Football Association and the government, specifically the Treasury, would be in the line of fire.
Molefi Olifant and Danny Jordaan’s letters, which have emerged in recent days, implicitly said that the government authorised the payment. In turn, a similar amount of money was transferred to the LOC to plug the hole created by the payment to Warner. The question is who gave the authorisation? Was the Cabinet, the finance minister or the president at the time made aware of why the money was needed, or were they misled? Was the government misled and bamboozled by LOC and football officials who were too keen to have the World Cup hosted here to care for the country’s anti-corruption laws?
There are two ways of responding to this. One is to pretend that all of this is a movie and at some point we’ll walk out of the theatre back into a scandal-free reality. So far officialdom appears to have chosen this path. The other is to find out for our own sanity what really happened, and deal with it in the best way we can so that the country can move on. While we are at it, we may want to work with authorities elsewhere to clean up the game and help the Fifa reform process. Football has been suffering under the weight of corruption, especially on our continent, for a very long time. We have a responsibility to ensure that this comes to an end.
Whatever we do, the process that has begun in the US will not stop. They send senators and governors to jail over there. Just the other day, Dominic Strauss-Kahn was handcuffed and marched to a New York police station in the glare of TV cameras. At the time, he was president of the International Monetary Fund and French political royalty who was once considered presidential material.
Rod Blagojevich, the former governor of Illinois, is in jail today because he sold Barack Obama’s US Senate seat when the latter became US president in 2008. John Edwards, onetime US presidential candidate and prominent politician, wound up in jail too, for financial dealings relating to his campaign.
They don’t care much for status over there, so burying our heads in the sand hoping our own aristocrats will escape scrutiny is stupid.
Skeletons kept tumbling out of the closet, revealing what could be the most embarrassing corruption scandal in years