SA’s soccer wars — the story behind those battles
Intrigue, posturing, betrayals, the seeking of personal glory, friendships and promises made and broken behind the scenes: This is the beautiful game in SA, writes BARENG-BATHO KORTJAAS
It is almost a decade since Danny Jordaan’s moment of glory. The CEO of the 2010 organising committee was the face of SA’s push to become the first and only African country to stage the greatest single-sport global spectacle, the World Cup. He managed the project with aplomb.
Then the desire to head the SA Football Association (Safa) drove an ambition that led to his presidency in 2013.
Upon assuming office, key members of the Football Transformation Forum that ushered him to power began to fall.
Former vice-presidents Elvis Shisana and Lucas Nhlapo are out. Gay Mokoena, a current vice-president who was acting Safa CEO until his four-month stint ended at the end of April, is an outcast among Jordaan’s supporters in the executive.
They seek to suspend Mokoena. His crime? Daring to challenge a leader whom he now accuses of adopting the posture of an executive president and violating the constitution of the football governing body.
Dennis Mumble, until recently one of Jordaan’s closest allies, is the latest to join the president-must-go bandwagon. “Safa must be freed from his shackles and he must go and retire at home,” said Mumble.
Homeboys from Port Elizabeth. Football foot soldiers at Safa. The ties that bind exSafa CEO Mumble and Jordaan are breaking. Mumble has accused Jordaan of running Safa like a personal stokvel.
Chief among Mumble’s charges is that Jordaan is a soul who thinks nothing of throwing others under the bus and is a resident of paranoiaville.
Mumble first came into contact with
Jordaan in 1996. That was in PE when Jordaan was an MP in the first parliament of Nelson Mandela’s administration.
When he came back from exile in the US in 1996, Mumble, who worked at Rutgers University as director of administrative and testing services, went to help in the ANC constituency office in Port Elizabeth’s northern areas, specifically in a place called Cleary Park.
“There were three ANC parliamentarians who represented that area and [Jordaan] was one of them. The others were Gregory Rockman, the former policeman who started the Police and Prisons Civil Rights Union [Popcru]. Greg and I grew up together in PE. And then there was Hope Malgas,” said Mumble.
Six months later, while contemplating a return to the US, Jordaan “came to me and said there is some trouble in football”.
This was because the late Stix Morewa had upgraded himself to an executive president of Safa.
Morewa’s cardinal sin was entering an unholy trinity with Brian Mahon, who had arrived in SA from Ireland after the end of isolation. Mahon headed Awesome Sports International (ASI), a marketing company.
In a nutshell, Safa sold its commercial soul to ASI by getting bonded in a contract that took away control of all its television, marketing and sponsorship rights to all its national teams. Instead of serving Safa, Safa became subservient to ASI. For the agency, it was the goose that laid golden eggs.
The development shook South African soccer. It became a matter of great public and media interest. It spawned the appointment of the Pickard Commission by President Mandela.
Pickard expressed “a firm conviction of mine, however, that whatever structures are decided upon, the principle of a full-time executive president is simply not acceptable”.
“I appreciate also that it is necessary to have a full-time executive to attend to the day-to-day affairs and negotiations on all levels on behalf of Safa. Any such persons should not be the president and should not chair meetings,” said the judge.
Added late minister of sport Steve Tshwete: “Awesome emasculated SA football, using Safa’s assets against it, in such a way that football was no longer run by Safa but by Awesome.”
Back to the Jordaan and Mumble journey. “In September of 1996 Danny started coming to the Safa office virtually full time because that is when Safa was getting mired in this Stix Morewa thing,” said Mumble.
“And then he said: ‘Listen, we are planning a big conference. I’d like for you to help me coordinate and put together this conference. I agreed because it was a short-term thing and I wasn’t doing anything other than work in the constituency office.
“The idea behind the Walls to Bridges conference, where all the different constituencies met, was to chart a new way forward for South African football because football was in crisis and virtually all role players were invited to attend.”
In attendance were people from different areas in football. Among them was Irvin Khoza, who came to be known as the Iron Duke.
“All of the major role players in football came to this thing because it was a unity conference.”
After plenty of presentations and debates on the state of South African football, the conference produced a plethora of resolutions.
“Our role,” said Mumble, “was to take those resolutions and give life to them. We designed a whole new administration and how it is that we are going to get South African football rolling again. We came out with a plan.”
Mumble was asked by Jordaan and then specifically by [former Safa president]
Molefi Oliphant to work full-time at Safa.
He started in April 1997 as the GM. Jordaan came in May 1997 as CEO because he had to still resign from parliament.
With that began Jordaan and Mumble’s 24-year working relationship. It allowed Mumble to get up close and personal with what he decries as an interfering being.
From 1997 to 2001 things went well. “Danny was pretty adept at raising money, raising funds for Safa at the time. And so Safa virtually made a U-turn because it now had more resources. It had a plan, which was being implemented. We worked together with a whole bunch of people.”
But unknown to Mumble, trouble was on the horizon. In December 2001 Safa had no money to pay staff salaries.
“Something happened which really pissed me off. We were waiting for money to come in from one or two sponsors and the sponsors’ money didn’t come. They could not process the money until January.
“We had to pay the staff. It’s December, they get the 13th cheque as well in December.
“Now Danny goes and negotiates an agreement with George Rautenbach, the guy who owns MegaPro. It’s a sports marketing company, but they were mostly involved in rugby at the time.
“They were looking for a way into football and George now saw this as a way that they could come into football.
“Danny said to me, since you and Oliphant are going to be in charge and I’m going with my family to the US, you and Oli go and meet George while I’m gone.
“George has already agreed. He will give us the money or advance us the money. It is a loan until we get the sponsorship money.” What did the contract say?
“The contract gave George some rights to go out and get sponsorships for Safa. Remember, a few years back Safa went through this thing [Pickard Commission] and one of the things [Pickard recommendations] is that all marketing must be done in-house. All promotional arrangements must be done in-house.”
Matters came to a head when the agreement was questioned by the executive.
“Now the Pickard Commission is still fresh in the minds of many people and somebody on the executive then questions this. But you guys are now outsourcing the marketing of Safa again.
“This agreement literally was taking exactly another route where we came from.”
But Jordaan absolved himself of any responsibility, said Mumble.
“Remember this is Danny that negotiated this thing. He gave me the document. All we needed to do was to go meet George to sign this thing.
“And Oliphant signed the document. But now Danny turns around and he blames me for this thing and says, Mumble is the one that agreed to this thing.
“Now he throws us under the bus. So I then decide that I can’t work with erm, erm what do you call it, a person like this, you know, who knew that I had nothing to do with it but he goes to members of the executive to say to them I must be fired because I am the one who did this thing. “I resigned from Safa.”
That was the end of 2001.
“I said I’m not staying in this organisation. Because he now throws me under the bus, he literally also threw Oliphant under the bus because he asked the two of us to go and finalise this thing.
“Now, when people queried it, he says he had nothing to do with it and he is pointing fingers to us. I just got fed up. I left.”
He went to open a Mumbles sports bar and restaurant in Berario, Johannesburg.
Mumble cites a June 1997 executive meeting as a potential cornerstone of the seeds of disharmony between Jordaan and Khoza, Safa’s third vice-president who happens to be chairperson of the Premier Soccer League (PSL).
“In June of 1997 we worked with a guy from England, erm, on a whole new structure of Safa.
“And we were now ready to put this in front of the NEC [the executive].
“We went to the NEC and the NEC approved it, a new organogram and a new way forward for South African football.
“According to Danny, Irvin walked into the NEC meeting with Oliphant and they then literally changed everything that was decided the previous week.
“Now Danny is upset. He is really pissed off. That, for me, was the moment I noticed that Danny and Irvin were like this [gestures with banging clenched fists].
“He felt so undermined. I don’t know. I can’t confirm whether Irvin did that or not because I was not in that NEC meeting.
“But he felt that Irvin is the one that came and undermined what they had decided the week before.
“So we came out with a modified version of what had originally been presented, you know. And now Danny is really teed off.
“And it is from that time for me where I noticed that, Danny — every single thing that happens — Danny will blame Irvin for it.
“He will walk down the street, stub his toe on a rock and he will blame Irvin for the rock laying in the road.”
Mumble said they initially worked well together.
“He was a person, when I first met, who sounded very knowledgeable about football. But over the years he changed.
“When I complained about his interference, he said he was going to work against me.
“There is a word I have not used in 30 years: transmogrified. It is when a person changes from one creature into another force, when the behaviour that was there in the beginning becomes a new disease.
“You have to listen to others and take into account what they have to say.”
Gross foul play
Basically Mumble believes Jordaan’s behaviour echoes that of Morewa, whose reign as Safa president ended in ruins after the Pickard Commission fingered him for gross foul play by upgrading himself to an executive president.
Last year the Sunday Times reported about Safa misrepresenting the numbers in its financial statements.
Another report was published of how the cash-strapped body paid over R2m to an outsourced electoral committee, a function that should have been performed internally without incurring any cost.
Safa never engaged with the content of the reports. Mokoena was at the forefront of attempts to rubbish the reports.
But Safa posted a R74m loss in its 2019 financial statement.
While his supporters beat the loudest drums in defence of him and pledging their support to Jordaan, their silence is deafening on why the management committee — the structure that takes decisions between conferences — has not met in over 18 months.
They are mum on the constitutionality of a vice-president Mokoena becoming an acting CEO.
Last week, in a statement, Safa dismissed Mumble’s claim that Jordaan violated its constitution.
“This is an attempt to create an atmosphere of instability,” it said. “[It] comes when there are no activities in South African football. The aim is to create the impression that there is need for an investigation in the organisation. This again comes during the period of lockdown after Safa received glowing reports at its congress of December 8 2019.”
Jordaan had run for the hills. Three press conferences called by Safa were cancelled on successive days last week.
Jordaan, who is in his second term and has designs on a third, believes it’s all an attempt to force a situation where there is an investigation into his reign.
That bad blood has led to strained relations between Safa and the PSL. To this day they have a difficult relationship, characterised by collisions.
The latest clash is crystallised by the extreme position of the two bodies on when football, suspended since March because of Covid-19, can return. To use the parlance of these coronavirus times, Safa and the PSL have socially distanced on the question of resumption of play.
The league is targeting a resumption of play at level 3, due to begin on June 1. Safa insists that matches resume only at level 1.
It took the intervention of minister of sports Nathi Mthethwa to get the warring factions around the table and talk with one voice.
Jordaan paints a picture of friends — Mumble and Mokoena — who have sour grapes because they have fallen out.
Friendship, what friendship? protests Mumble.
“We have never been friends. We were work acquaintances. Friends have braais at their homes.
“They’d go and hang out together and that is not what we did. I didn’t know him before 1996. When we met outside the office, it was business and not to ask this or that about your wife or girlfriend.”
To his mind, Jordaan sees Mumble’s document as part of an elaborate plan to topple him.
In his view Mumble is a hired gun, doing the bidding for Khoza in what Jordaan sees as soccer wars. By extension, his fertile imagination includes the Sunday Times in this plan.
Casting himself as a victim in a paranoia-peppered universe, he said as much to Khoza, a vice-president of Safa, after their meeting a fortnight ago.
“I’ve just finished a meeting with my president. He says I am using my people at the Sunday Times to attack him.”
Holy moly.
“Tell him for me, that the last time I checked your surname, if he has something to say, he can call me directly,” was my retort to Khoza.
● It all began on May Day. My colleague Sazi Hadebe and I had caught wind of a document compiled by Mumble in which he made allegations against Jordaan.
Given the seriousness of allegations like flouting the Safa constitution, we reached out to Jordaan for an interview. Three phone calls. No response. Whatsapp message. Blue tick. No response. Safa communications director Dominic Chimhavi also did not respond to calls.
After consulting with the editor, we decided to hold back.
Chimhavi made contact last week on Saturday. “I was not going to respond yesterday because it was a public holiday [May 1].” We request an interview. No, send questions. Questions were sent to Chimhavi on Wednesday. He acknowledged receipt and committed to respond. Nothing came forth.
On Friday of the same week, Jordaan, through Chimhavi, requested a meeting with my editor during which he said Hadebe and I were part of a plot by his enemies to attack him. In the conversation he agreed that he would grant the interview. He didn’t keep his word. When Chimhavi was called to confirm the interview, he promised to come back with a date and time.
Again, we held back.
To this day, day 24, we’ve received nada in the form of a response.
We provided him with a platform to state his side of the story.
I’ve just finished a meeting with my president. He says I am using my people at the Sunday Times to attack him
Dennis Mumble
Former Safa CEO