Within rights to ask questions

THE letter titled “DA sniping at Jordaan loses the party my vote” (June 15) by Dawood Beydon needs challenging. Athol Trollip, as DA mayoral candidate for this metro next year, is fully within his rights to question mayor Danny Jordaan about the Fifa scandal.

The issue is not whether the mayor has been implicated in this fiasco. What is at stake here is that there is a nasty whiff of alleged financial and fiduciary corruption from Fifa, and Jordaan was the South African chief executive of Fifa at the time and in charge of bringing the 2010 World Cup to this country.

As such, this corruption that also implicated a South African (whomever that may be) unfortunately happened under Jordaan’s watch. Jordaan as a public figure then and now has a moral duty to explain himself and answer Trollip’s concerns.

If Trollip and the DA were not seeking answers in this serious matter then the DA would be failing in its constitutionally mandated political function of oversight on the spending of public money. Therefore, the rigorous questioning by Trollip and the DA with regard to this matter is very much in the public interest.

Therefore no amount of “protecting Danny” by the ANC will wish this matter away. The mayor needs to explain what happened as a course of public duty and he would be shirking his responsibilities if he failed to do so.

By denying citizens the right to be fully informed of this whole Fifa fiasco is to deny them freedom of information, and opportunity to debate and ponder the merits of this matter.