Zimpapers Logo

Off the ball with Limukani Ncube
THE biggest story this week was the arrest of 14 Fifa officials during the world football governing body’s Congress in Switzerland. It was a story that touched everyone, football fan and non-football fan alike.

Why? Simple because football is a people’s sport. Sport belongs to the people, it’s part of our culture, the social cement that holds us together. And just as corruption by public officials is a cause for concern, it also matters when bad men take control of the people’s sport and use it for their own personal ends.

We have always had concerns about how football is run locally, why men of no capacity seem to find their way into office and why squabbles never end in football, but like they say, if you jump into the deep end of the corridor of power you will come across a gigantic fish, rotting, as fish tend to, from the head. Events at Fifa this week no doubt confirmed that the fish indeed rots from the head.

To add drama to the whole thing, disgraced former Fifa vice president Jack Warner, who is one of those arrested on various corruption charges involving about US$150 million, claimed he was too ill to face reporters outside prison in Trinidad where he was being held on eight charges in the FBI corruption case on Thursday. But just hours later, the media in the UK reported that he donned a celebratory garland of flowers and whipped a crowd of political allies into a frenzy with an energetic and defiant speech professing his innocence.

He later insisted that if he has been accused by US prosecutors, then Fifa president Sepp Blatter must also face charges. As pictures of the rally emerged those fighting on Blatter’s corner suggested the US-led investigation was a Western conspiracy. Those fighting on Blatter’s corner believe if England had got the right to host the Fifa World Cup in 2018, which will go to Russia, and US got the 2022 tournament set for Qatar things would have been different. And the main man, Blatter, declared he had nothing to do with corruption and those on the wrong side of the law should face the music alone.

Perhaps what the world saw this week had already been alluded to by a British journalist, Andrew Jennings, in his book Foul! The Secret World of Fifa: Bribes, Vote Rigging and Ticket Scandals who also indicated that the rot in sport was even deep rooted in the biggest competition, Olympics. And in 1998, the US Senate investigated the Olympics over corruption claims.

What we learn from events at Fifa is that while football remains the beautiful game, some men have been there, taking what they can in all associations in the world. The tragedy of it all is that the beautiful game will never get beautiful administrators that it deserves. It seems the trend in Zimbabwe is similar to the trend the world over.

Ever since Blatter succeeded Joao Havalenge in 1998, he has always made Africa his stronghold, and many believed he won the 1998 vote in Africa, where by then, the continent had 50 votes. And even in the elections yesterday, the 53 nations of Africa stood behind Blatter, and you can’t blame them, he has done much for the associations, dishing out between $500,000 and $750,000 annually and also embarking on other projects, funding the building of national associations headquarters, training villages and so on, and also providing funds for the development of coaches and referees and lots of money comes in, and only a handful of those in the corridors of power know how it is spent. And yesterday Zifa president Cuthbert Dube was interviewed on Sky news saying he will vote for Blatter, insisting “ we can’t betray a man who has helped us so much.”

According the book, many claimed Blatter stole the vote after revelations that Haiti did not send a representative but the attendance register at the Fifa Congress showed that Haiti was represented by someone who later on turned out to be a girlfriend to one of “Blatter’s boys”

At Blatter’s victory press conference, a German reporter asked him about the allegations that his campaign had been funded from the Gulf. He replied, the book says, “The match is over. The players have already gone to the dressing room, I will not respond.” He went on to refute that $50,000 bundles had been handed out to African delegates, supposedly as advance payments for developmental projects in their countries but seeming like inducements ahead of the election.

There were elections yesterday, and the former ice hockey keen follower, Blatter, who started working for Fifa in 1975 as a director for development, prevailed over Prince Ali of Jordan, and of course, stories would then come out with lots of allegations of how the vote was won and lost.

Such is football, and because Fifa has managed to grow in stature and become even more powerful than some nations in the world, there is little that can be done to correct the perceived anomalies, and the trend trickles down to local football, where even the government has its hands tied to crack the whip on Zifa, because Fifa does not allow government interference in sport, and once that happens, the country is banished from international football.

But if ever you were wondering why people jostle so much to go into positions in football, you probably have a hint now because they are not just doing it for the “love of the game”. From what we have seen so far, there is something to be gained, and I’m sure those who have been arrested also told their backers when running for office that they were doing it for the “love of the game”, but hell no, we now all know, football is the goose that lays the golden egg.

Disgraceful, scandalous, unbelievable, just three of the adjectives that have been used over the past few days and rightly so to describe what is happening in our football, where one African leader claimed he was given a loan of $80,000 by a Fifa executive member. “This for Fifa is good,” pronounced spokesperson Walter De Gregorio <http://www.fifa.com/about-fifa/news/y=2015/m=5/news=press-conference-live-at-11-00-cet-2609064.html>, when 14 defendants (seven of them, including two Fifa vice-presidents, plucked from their Zurich hotel) were being indicted in New York for what the US attorney-general Loretta Lynch <http://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/nine-fifa-officials-and-five-corporate-executives-indicted-racketeering-conspiracy-and> called “corruption that is rampant, systemic and deep-rooted”, involving abuse of trust to acquire “millions of dollars in bribes and kickbacks”. If this was one of Fifa’s good days, the mind boggles at what a bad one might look like, opined one writer, after Fifa said it supported the arrest of those caught up in the corruption scandal, insisting it started the probe when it sent some documents to the US authorities to help with investigations.

The match-fixing scandal, better known as Asiagate, did not stick in South Africa, though there were claims some matches prior to the 2010 Fifa World Cup by Bafana Bafana were “money games”. The claims seemed to stick in Zimbabwe, with more than 100 players and officials getting suspended, but the ghost of football corruption seemed to be back to haunt South Africa, with the US investigators claiming the 2010 World Cup bid won by Mzansi was also fraught with irregularities. The South African government has refuted claimed it facilitated payment of bribes of up to $10 million to win the vote, but we wait to see what comes out of the closet once the matter spills into court. Was young Gaddafi right to say “Blatter’s committee is real mafia” after Mzansi won the 2010 bid? Only time will tell.

• For views and comments email [email protected]. You can also follow this writer on Twitter and Facebook.