“Can Mbeki be believed?”
Amongst the bills covered by taxpayers were $3.1 billion in construction costs for ten stadiums (most are white elephants now), an unnecessary new $1 billion airport in Durban, $3.2 billion in profits sucked offshore by FIFA without taxation or exchange controls, and the unquantifiable cost of degraded political rights, housing displacement and elite back-slapping. Brazil suffered far worse, with more graft and many more forced removals from Rio’s favelas – and much bigger pre-Cup social protests in 2013-14 than even South Africa managed in 2010.
But even aside from these bribery revelations, the hangover from hosting the World Cup remains. Celebrating the FIFA bid victory back in 2004, Mbeki intoned “We want to ensure that, one day, historians will reflect upon the 2010 World Cup as a moment when Africa stood tall and resolutely turned the tide on centuries of poverty and conflict.” In reality, hosting the World Cup increased poverty and conflict here, just as happened in Brazil last year.
The US Justice Department completely neglected to mention these most corrupting aspects of FIFA’s rule. A year ago, on a BBC debate, I put it to Jordaan that he was implicated in FIFA’s white elephantism, reminding of how even he had once apologized for luring poor municipalities into building unneeded stadiums, and I complained that in the two most unequal major countries in the world, South Africa and Brazil, FIFA had a responsibility to democratize the World Cup model, not exacerbate inequality. Jordaan giggled in a disturbing way, and then simply cranked up his nationalistic rhetoric (for example, at 8:45 into the tape at http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p020r2wy).
This was well understood by business strategists, reflected in the May 2010 remarks of senior insurance industry underwriter Trevor Kerst: “FIFA pays no taxes and institutes exclusion zones around the stadiums where matches take place, and tax income is curtailed. Within these exclusion zones, only FIFA and its partners may sell any goods; nothing from these sales accrues to the government.”
Do US Attorney General Loretta Lynch and the FBI give a damn about the deeper economic and political corruption of our society in 2010, represented by elites like Mbeki and Zuma giddily rolling the country under Blatter’s FIFA steamroller? There is no evidence in her anti-FIFA documentation of any awareness, much less critique of the way over-commercialised sports create mega-project mania in cities.
Blatter’s initial rebuttal was that the charges were laid because a bitter US establishment lost the 2022 World Cup bid to Qatar, because Britain lost the 2018 bid to Russia (which in Ukraine is the main adversary of US foreign policy once again) and because Washington is “the number one sponsor of the Hashemite Kingdom, therefore of my adversary (Jordan’s Prince Ali)… There is something that smells” about the investigation, Blatter pronounced. Donning this ill-fitting victim mantle, he successfully rallied the majority of 203 country votes for his re-election as FIFA chief executive last Friday. South Africa was one of the countries voting for Blatter. No doubt authorities in Pretoria – and Jordaan’s SA Football Association – will continue scrambling with Blatter in coming weeks to creatively explain or disguise the full extent of the bribery.