Sepp Blatter good for Africa
Jun 01, 2015
The world has come a long way from when everything that involved Europe and North America came with the prefix ‘world’ attached to it; from World Wars, World Cups to World Summits.
By Joseph Kabuleta
The world has come a long way from when everything that involved Europe and North America came with the prefix ‘world’ attached to it; from World Wars, World Cups to World Summits.
Even if baseball still has a ‘world series’ which features only American teams and tournaments like the Ryder Cup are a hangover from that period, the ‘world’ is that much bigger these days.
In football, Europe is struggling to come to terms with the new reality in which England is just one of the 209 FIFA member states, on level footing with Lesotho. You would have to roll back several decades to understand England’s inflated sense of self-importance and their antipathy towards Sepp Blatter.
The year was 1966; FIFA president Stanley Rous was an Englishman, the World Cup was held in England and was won by… you know who. It was a World Cup only in name. In reality it was a Europe- South America duopoly. Africa and Asia had just one representative between them.
By the mid 1970s, several African and Asian countries had acquired independence, mostly from Britain, and were beginning to have a voice. FIFA, which was an exclusive club, was beginning to look like the last bastion of colonial hegemony. Rous, it’s increasingly bleak head, was a known supporter of apartheid South Africa.
In 1974, Brazilian lawyer Joao Havelange beat Rous to the presidency and set about revolutionalising FIFA, turning it from a tiny amateurish federation into one of the world's most powerful organisations. Havelange’s first few years at the helm showed just how dreary the Englishman’s reign had been.
Havelange promised to double the size of the World Cup from 16 to 32 teams to make room for the developing world, to create under-age tournaments down to Under-17 and to make the game corporate. He delivered on all fronts. In 1998, at the age of 82, he stepped down and anointed Blatter as his preferred successor. Europe’s attempt to win back the presidency came in the shape of the stone-faced Lennart Johansson, who was president of European football’s governing body UEFA. The Swede buried his chances when he gave a racist interview to a newspaper following a campaign trip to South Africa in 1996.
“When I got to South Africa the whole room was full of blackies and it's dark when they sit down all together,” he said. “What's more it's no fun when they're angry. I thought if this lot get in a bad mood it won't be so funny.”
African countries voted en masse for Blatter, who won comfortably. It was under his watch that the Europe-America monopoly of hosting the World Cup ended with Japan-South Korea 2002. But Blatter’s problems with Europe started when he made a bold promise to bring the World Cup to Africa. He nearly delivered in 2006 but, with the vote sitting on a knife edge, Oceania delegate, British-born New Zealander Charlie Dempsey, chose to abstain from the final round of voting citing “intolerable pressure”. His controversial decision led to Germany beating South Africa in a narrow vote.
Undeterred, FIFA decided that the hosting of tournament would be awarded on a rotational basis, starting with the one continent that had never hosted it. South Africa narrowly beat Morocco to the vote for 2010.
In the years after the vote, the English media fed the world on news of South Africa’s alarming rate of crime, rape and murder. The construction of the stadiums and other facilities was always portrayed as irredeemably behind schedule. Poor people in slams were liberally quoted saying that the nation was wasting money on football instead of spending it on key sectors like education. The World Cup was presented as an unnecessary burden for ‘impoverished’ Africa; a classic Western storyline whenever we try to do something big.
And the often deluded English media placed England at the top of an imaginary list of “alternative hosts” in case South Africa failed. The other country on the list was Germany. That list continued to be flaunted even after a successful Confederations Cup in South Africa in June 2009. At the World Cup draw in Cape Town in December 2009, a few minutes before the live broadcast of the event was scheduled to be relayed across the world, a German photojournalist dumped a black camera bag in a hall close to where the football dignitaries had assembled and screamed “bomb, bomb”.
A brave South African policeman ignored rules of procedure and walked straight to the case. On opening it he found only books. Normal procedure in the event of such a bomb scare should have involved evacuating the building. If that had been done the live telecast of the draw would have been delayed and the “Africa is not ready” soap opera would have a perfect script for its next episode.
Is it possible that the 68 year-old photographer was just in the mood for a naughty prank? Was he acting independently? I don’t think so!
But for some reason everything was swept under the carpet and Bernd Fischer, the pensioner responsible for such an act of attempted sabotage, got off with a fine of R5000.
When everything failed and an African World Cup became inevitable, Europeans resorted to issuing self-righteous statements in a way that only Europeans and Americans can. Bayern Munich president Uli Hoeness said that awarding the tournament to Africa was the “biggest wrong decision” FIFA has ever made. Like everyone else, he put the anomaly down to corruption in the organisation.
But a resolute Blatter described Hoeness’ statement as an “anti-Africa prejudice”.
“There is still in the so-called 'old world' a feeling that why the hell should Africa organise a World Cup,” the FIFA boss said. “Colonialists over the past 100 years have gone to Africa and taken out all the best things, and now they are taking all the best footballers. There's no respect.”
In an LOL turn of events, Hoeness, the one-time ‘clean-up FIFA’ spokesman is presently serving a three- and-a-half year jail term after being convicted of tax evasion.
After Africa and South America had had their turns in Blatter’s rotational system, the pendulum swung back to Europe. England was believed to have a fair chance for 2018 until their media poked its priggish nose into sensitive places. The Sunday Times pulled off a ‘Fake Sheik’ stunt and caught two FIFA delegates on camera agreeing to sell their vote for a sum of money. FIFA suspended the pair, but the English bid lost many friends in high areas.
The BBC compounded the problem with a Panorama program claiming that some FIFA delegates had taken bribes in the early 1990s. On announcement day, England gathered all its celebrities, from David Beckham to Prince William, but left shamefaced after getting just two votes. As expected, they went back to their theme song: “Corruption in FIFA”.
The English protest seemed to have run out of steam, with stories demonizing FIFA reducing to a trickle as there was a sense of resignation to the apparent inevitability of a Blatter re-election…. until America’s FBI came in with their indictment of football officials over corruption.
Anyone who believes that the FBI charges, curiously timed to cause a news splash just before the FIFA elections, are really about corruption probably also believed that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.
If Americans were really that concern about corruption in sports bodies they should have started by jailing all their officials involved in the extremely flawed process of awarding the 2002 Winter Olympics to Salt Lake City (Utah, USA) by IOC. That was one of the biggest scandals in the world of sport. The IOC suspended ten members as a result and changed many rules, making it Ground Zero for corruption in sport. But the American officials at the heart of it were quickly cleared of any wrongdoing by their country’s Justice Department.
But when a questionable bidding process awards the World Cup to Russia and offers Vladimir Putin another opportunity to chest-thump, like he did after a successful Sochi Winter Olympics, then America rediscovers its urge to fight corruption in sport.
So is the FIFA debate going to be another incident in which Africans walk blindly into an alley of Western interests crudely disguised as a moral crusade or are we going to be independent-minded and consider where our own interests lie?
It is Blatter who expanded the World Club Championship to include African teams. Previously it was contested between Europe and South America, ostensibly because clubs from this continent were unworthy to share the same platform with the lofty Europeans. That was classic football apartheid.
It was Blatter who started the Confederations Cup where the African national champion competes with the finest from all continents. The self-important Europeans tried to stall that too, calling it a meaningless competition.
It is Blatter who splits the World Cup cash equally and gives our federations more than $500,000 in annual development grants. In Uganda, that money is largely swindled but that is hardly the big man’s fault. Countries like Rwanda and Ethiopia have used the same grant to construct wonderful football academies.
Nobody outside of Europe wants to take us back to the Euro-centric FIFA that behaved like colonial masters. That’s why Blatter was re-elected comfortably and, make no mistake, another four years of the Swiss is good for Africa.
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