SO who then was the South African bid committee official who handed over a briefcase stuffed with cash in $10 000 stacks in a Paris hotel room as part of the alleged $10-million bribe to secure the 2010 Fifa World Cup?
In US attorney general Loretta Lynch’s thrilling indictment – it really is a wonderfully-written document – “Co-Conspirator #15”, is identified only as a “high-ranking official” of both the 2006 and 2010 bid committees and the 2010 local organising committee.
The nation’s newsrooms have been bombarding her office for more details but to no avail. At the time of writing, the bagman’s identity remains a secret. Here at the Mahogany Ridge, where much attention has been devoted to the unfolding Fifa drama, we have our suspicions.
The bribery allegations have been denied as a matter of course. Minister in the Presidency Jeff Radebe, who was a member of the 2010 local organising committee, said that as far as they were concerned, government’s hands were clean in this matter.
Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula has, typically, been full of it in this regard. “We’re told that we’re the main actors of this movie,” he told reporters, “whereas the main actor is Fifa. We shouldn’t be the ones victimised deliberately and unavoidably in this process.”
At the time of these comments, he had yet to read the aptly-named Lynch’s indictment. Once Mbalula has done so he too may be amused, as we were, by her talk of “organised soccer”. But we doubt it.
I was in Zurich 11 years ago for the 2010 winning bid announcement. By then, the contest was just between South Africa and Morocco. Chatting to reporters at a restaurant in the railway station –– so clean, you could actually eat there –– it was clear that it was still anyone’s race. Morocco’s main advantage was its proximity to Europe; whereas, although we had the infrastructure, we were half a world away, a long way for fans to travel.
But there were many in our bid delegation who seemed to have no doubt about the outcome whatsoever. It was unsettlingly odd, I reported at the time, that celebrations at the upmarket Dolder Grand Hotel, where the South Africans were staying, began the day before the winner was announced.
The party started on the afternoon of Friday, May 14 2004, immediately after the last presentation to Fifa. The national propensity for the copious and conspicuous consumption of alcohol was proudly on display. Small Swiss serving folk recoiled, as if from vipers, as large men in Bafana Bafana merchandise bore down on the bar like Visigoths and waved empty beer glasses, demanding they be filled –– to the brim –– with scotch.
Within an hour or two the room was loud and off its face –– and this was just the pre-prandial stuff. That evening there was the grand banquet, thrown for Fifa and attended by then president Thabo Mbeki, his predecessors Nelson Mandela and FW de Klerk, as well as Archbishop Desmond Tutu.
Three Nobel Peace Prize winners and a small person so Fifa boss Sepp Blatter wouldn’t feel intimidated? This was not loser behaviour.
Away from the pig-circus and back at the railway station, the intrigue over the swaggering certainty of victory continued to grow. One suggestion was that the bid would be ours merely because Blatter wanted the photo-op with Mandela. I later and perhaps over-dramatically reported that Zurich was “so choked with conspiracy and dark intrigue that it made Graham Greene’s The Third Man look like the seventh dwarf, Dopey.” (The novel is set in Vienna. But no matter.)
Blatter announced the winning bid at 12.21pm on the Saturday. Many of the South Africans at Fifa’s headquarters were hungover like dogs and could only muster half-hearted cheers and a few desultory vuvuzela blasts. But Mandela and Tutu were on top form, the latter even joking that he would be dishing out “air tickets to heaven” for those Fifa members who’d voted for South Africa. “But don’t use it immediately,” he said. Blatter got his photo.
Later, as the South Africans were checking out the Dolder Grand, I found Safa boss Danny Jordaan at the bar, nursing a drink. He was very tired and emotional. I tried goading him to say something useful for journalism purposes but without much luck. I could make no sense of his grunts.
Fast-forward to the present, and two days into the new job as Nelson Mandela Bay metro mayor, Jordaan’s back in Zurich on Fifa business. And Blatter –– now casting himself, astonishingly, as Fifa’s great corruption-buster –– retains his hold over world football.
This article first appeared in the Weekend Argus.
