Danny Jordaan: The dream sours
For the first part of this story, please click here
Ahead of the World Cup I was dubbed the Sunday Times’ 2010 correspondent. It was less an honour than one of those jobs nobody else wanted to do because they already had their plates full with other stuff. I would meet Danny Jordaan — the person largely responsible for bringing the event to our shores — for breakfast in Sandton occasionally.
I remember agreeing to meet in Eastgate, a shopping mall on the Eastern side of Johannesburg.
Miraculously, Jordaan, who drove a massive BMW, managed to get lost. He seemed so stressed and so absent-minded that I wondered sometimes how he managed to wake up in the morning, or if he perhaps needed to get somebody else to do that for him.
Despite escapades on golf carts in the Caribbean and late-night phone calls, we became fond of each other. He was a left-arm medium-pace bowler, he once told me, which somehow fitted. He asked me to write his book, either to be a ghost-written autobiography or a biography.
He sometimes looked green from over-work, which went well with the permanently dishevelled look. There was a period, let’s not forget, during which Fifa became uppity about South Africa’s perceived lack of building progress, and parachuted a whole lot of their Swiss A-team down to South Africa.
I remember a name — Delia Fischer. If you needed anything, you went to Delia. She was so time sensitive she ticked all the chronological boxes.
The World Cup was a jol, from Siphiwe Tshabalala’s equaliser against Mexico in the opening game to Diego Maradona press conferences, from Spain’s tiki-taka to Ghana’s better-than-expected run and that hand-ball. But eventually, the vuvuzelas stopped blaring and the fun ended. The dream began to fade. Worse still, the dream began to sour.
It transpired that pre-World Cup Bafana friendlies against Thailand, Colombia, Guatemala and Bulgaria had been fixed by a group of mainly Singaporean match-fixers with assumed names like Simon Mega-Diamond and Jason-Joe Lourdes.
They infiltrated the South African Football Association’s (Safa) referees’ department, very few of whom thought there was anything amiss when the fixers — men they had never set eyes upon — offered procure referees which they hadn’t vetted. And at less than the going rate.
Safa, of which Jordaan became president after his World Cup golf cart and mayoral duties were over, became byzantine and inefficient. Its executive was massive. Chief executives came and went. Here was a culture that appeared to be more in thrall to factionalism and patronage than it did to delivery.
In 2011, Chuck Blazer and Jack Warner, the companeros Jordaan had been schmoozing in Grenada, stopped scratching each other’s backs. Warner was exposed by Blazer in a money-for-votes scam and resigned from the Fifa executive, but not before he had secured his pension.
In one of his more ingenious scams, he built a football centre of excellence on the outskirts of Port of Spain. He renamed the facility the João Havelange Centre of Excellence (COE) without the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football’s (Concacaf) knowledge, Havelange being the Brazilian bruiser and head of Fifa who was once accused in the Brazilian media of running guns into Bolivia.
Using a front company owned by himself, his wife and his son called Renraw, which is Warner spelled backwards, he bought the land for the João Havelange Centre of Excellence from Lever Brothers West Indies.
They rented this land back to Concacaf, who thought they owned both the centre and the land upon which it was built.
Sir Anthony Cathcart Simmonds, former attorney general of Barbados, wrote an Integrity Report about Warner and Blazer’s goings-on published in April 2013. “In the end, as a result of his fraudulent conduct, Warner divested Concacaf and Fifa of approximately $26 million, and Warner obtained title to the COE property, which rightfully belongs to Concacaf.”
Warner didn’t get to where he got by retiring to the front lawn to do tai-chi and frolic with his grand-children. After Blazer had shopped him, he returned the favour. And so the FBI came after Blazer. The man who had once rented an apartment in Trump Towers in Manhattan only for his cats was pulled off his scooter and told to put his diary on hold.
Blazer was nabbed on tax-evasion and money-laundering charges. It was found out that he loved to pay himself commissions. His world — and that of Warner’s — I remember writing at the time, was not of one checks and balances, but of cheques and balances.
Jordaan wasn’t just dimly aware that all of this was going on somewhere in the middle distance. He was surely also aware of the shenanigans in the so-called African Diaspora Program. The details need not concern us here, suffice it to say that Warner was again involved.
In 2015, for example, the Financial Times followed African Diaspora Program money. It concluded that at roughly the same time that Fifa was paying Warner for the “Diaspora Legacy Program”, so $72 million found its way into a Tunisian business person and international football power-broker’s HSBC account in Switzerland. It is an amount, they said, that roughly corresponded to $70 million the South Africans admitted using to “assist[ing] African football federations”.
Let’s not beat around the bush, this is tantamount to admitting you are paying bribes in return for votes. And it was not going on while Jordaan was peering into his briefcase, trying to remember what it was that he thought he was looking for.
The feeling that more could have been made out of the World Cup is widespread. There was so much energy, so much goodwill, generated by South Africa’s successful hosting in 2010, that the years since seem like an opportunity missed. Jordaan, surely, is part of this missed opportunity. With the goals at his mercy he, as in rugby, hoofed it over the bar.
He told me and many others in the mid-1990s that football in this country wanted its place in the sun. Given the legacy of apartheid, who would disagree? But what have we done with that place?
Do the fields blush with flowers? Are we producing a small percentage of the world’s best players, the world’s best administrators, the world’s best referees? We all know the answers to these questions. Last week Bafana Bafana beat South Sudan in an Africa Cup of Nations qualifier. In some quarters this was hailed as a victory worth celebrating.
The Safa saga seems like a long-running pantomime. There is always some kerfuffle about money, where it is, where it is not and where it has gone. Safa’s auditors, PwC, didn’t only resign once, they resigned twice — in 2019 and 2020. We have all read about the President’s Discretionary Fund. That’s not a phrase anyone but the president likes the look of.
And how about the Jennifer Ferguson rape allegations against Jordaan? Why would a musician like Ferguson, now living in faraway Sweden with children of her own, concoct rape allegations if she didn’t feel compelled to do so? What would there possibly be to gain?
The slightly jaundiced among us can’t have helped noticing that the current charges against Jordaan, of theft and fraud amounting to R1.3 million, are negligible ones. This suggests that there are those who want Jordaan to go and, after this conclusion was reached, they needed to find charges against him to support their desire to be rid of him.
Jordaan, however, has nothing else. The cut-and-thrust is what he lives for. And here’s a cheeky thought: given the company he keeps — or, more accurately, the company he once kept among the power-brokers of the international game, the comedy duo that was Warner and Blazer — is it really surprising that he’s charged private security to Safa’s account? These are glimpses into a hidden world of dysfunction of which Jordaan is only a part.
One can’t help but notice Jordaan has a nasty habit of sticking around, hogging the ball like an old-fashioned playmaker. Whenever someone has shouted for him to come off, he’s gestured back that he can’t hear. He’s been staying on for close to 30 years now.
He’s in illustrious company. Havelange, Warner’s chum, was president of Fifa for 24 years; Sepp Blatter, Havelange’s successor, was president for 17.
It tells you that men of their ilk, through amiability, patronage, the breezy arts of back-slapping and the dark arts of secret handshakes, tend to like the positions they’re in. That means they stick around.
When they need to go to ground, they do so. A couple of months later, they’re up and running again, which enables them to stick around until at least the next drama. These are guys that play for the full 90. They always have.
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