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“When children ask me what it is I do exactly, I tell them I have made a life and a living out of chasing bad men. I have investigated corrupt police-officers, corrupt governments and professional criminals. I have won awards for my work on secret British involvement in the Iran/Contra scandal and crooked cops. And when I turned 40 I started looking into sport. Sport? Some of my comrades in investigative journalism asked me, had I gone soft? Not a bit of it. Sport belongs to the people. It is part of our culture, the social cement that holds us together. And just as corruption in government and among police officers causes public concern, so too, it matters when bad men take control of the people’s sport and use it for their own personal ends.
“So I trawled the waters of sport politics and came up with one gigantic fish, rotting, as fish tend to, from the head. It was, of all things, the Olympics. I revealed that Juan Antonio Samaranch, former leader of the Olympics, had been a career fascist, a minister in the government of the murderous Spanish dictator Franco. And I discovered that among the men who stood behind him in his International Olympic Committee were some who should have been behind bars (and have since spent time there) and many for whom Olympics politics was not a way to serve the people, but self service, big time-and supersize that. Investigative reporters don’t always live to see bad men get their comeuppance, but the whole world saw Olympic corruption blow up back in 1998 and when the US Senate investigated the scandal they invited me to testify in Washington.
“It has taken years (investigating football). The things I have discovered have shocked even me. Some bad guys have been in there taking what they can. It’s still the beautiful game, of course. They can’t take that away from us. But, as you will read here, there has been some ugly business going on. I would like to see the beautiful game get the leadership it deserves. In that spirit I dedicate this book to the fans.”
The thick volume gets into details about the alleged goings on at Fifa, how the bosses line up their pockets using kick backs from television and hosting rights of world cups and tournaments as well sponsorship packages, and of course, the hot potato of vote rigging and vote buying.
Over the years, because everyone was turning a blind eye to the dark corners of sport, it became a breeding ground for serious corruption the world over, which blew up with legendary athletes like
Marion Jones getting stripped of glorious medals for using performance enhancing drugs. Diego Maradona was also dismissed from a World Cup tournament after failing a doping test. We saw it in Italy when Juventus were caught in a web of match-fixing and were severely punished and I must say, from that time, they have struggled to regain their five star status in world football.
The controversy has engulfed all sporting disciplines because in the years gone by, people would cheat, steal and get away with it. Even in motoring, there is controversy and allegations of result fixing. In motor racing, the important aspect is team orders, which is a motorsport term for the practice of teams issuing instructions to drivers to deviate from the normal practice of racing against each other as they would against other teams’ drivers.
Prime examples of this were the team orders issued by Formula One teams to their drivers. This may involve instructing a driver to let his teammate overtake, or instructing both drivers to hold position in order to maintain a good position without the risk of collision. This is generally done when one driver is behind in a particular race but ahead overall in a championship season. The team will then order their drivers to rearrange themselves on the track so as to give the championship points to the driver who needs them most.
Since the turn of the century, the most notorious incidents of team orders have tended to centre on Ferrari. At the 2002 Austrian Grand Prix, Rubens Barrichello was ordered to allow Ferrari teammate
Michael Schumacher to pass in order to obtain the win. This received huge amounts of negative attention from spectators and media, as the order was issued shortly before both drivers crossed the finish line (the switch occurring within metres of the finish line), as Barrichello had dominated the entire race weekend. Schumacher refused to take the top step of the podium, insisting Barrichello take it. As team orders were legal in 2002, the only punishment the team received was for the breach of podium procedure.
You get the same sad story in cricket. The reason being that there is big money in sport. But for crooks only. Now here we are with our local football that has been dented seriously with allegations of match-fixing from the Asiagate, which is likely to have some characters banished from the beautiful game. National teams and some teams were participating in fixed matches in Asian countries and there are suspicions that some matches in the Caf Champions league were also predetermined.
When football fans thought they had heard enough of such mischief, a similar issue ballooned in the Zifa Central Region, starting off as pub talk that we hear every day that a referee was bribed to influence the outcome of a match. It got more serious when chairman Patrick Hokonya directed that investigations be carried out and culprits brought to book, but the whole thing blew up in his face when his name was dragged through the mud, together with his Southern Region counterpart Gift Banda.
A number of referees have already been suspended to allow investigations to be conducted but what has stung the nation is the manner in which board members, who are the principals in our football, have been getting suspended. The Asiagate claimed vice president Kenny Marange, board member development Methembe Ndlovu and Northern Region chairman Solomon Mugavazi, who stand accused of having a hand in the circus that took place in Asian countries. Ndlovu travelled as coach of one of the national teams, Marange officiated in some or one of the games while Mugavazi had his team, Monomotapa, masquerading as the national team.
The suspension of Hokonya and Banda brought to five, board members whose football life is on a knife edge and with counter accusations coming up every day, the nation awaits the last man standing. There is really no one who is not being accused of some wrong doing at Zifa, no, not even one, but as the IsiNdebele saying goes, isela ngelibanjiweyo (the thief is the one who has been caught), we cannot paint everyone with the same brush. And equally, we are guided by the principle that suspension does not mean that you are guilty, it is just a way of trying to remove you from an influential position so that investigations can take place. No one is guilty until they are taken to a hearing and found guilty and punished.
Nonetheless, the tragedy is that football administrators have allowed referees to influence matches for a long time such that it sunk into their blood stream that a team which wins should have pushed a brown envelope. And by the way, corruption involves two parties, one who gives and one who receives, and in this case, clubs are also part of the scam and serious cleansing needs to be done for our football to attract sponsors and be taken seriously by the outside world.
I was listening to people talking about how much teams were paying and the gifts purportedly given to referees and other officials so as to win and wondered what was the motive behind. Just to win and be promoted into the Premier League? And then get what since there are no grants for teams in the premiership? Just for prestige? It does not make sense to me. Why spend $100 to get $10 or slide into a more financially demanding scenario? Can someone give me the answer please!
Nonetheless, the story of the week was the suspension of Hokonya and Banda and in yesterday’s issue of The Herald, Banda maintained that he was innocent and said he will fight his suspension.
“There are a number of things that we are looking at to challenge this suspension, which came about after a number of constitutional issues had been violated at our board meeting. There is nothing in the Zifa constitution that says the board can suspend someone pending investigations, as they said in the media statement, but one can be suspended pending a disciplinary hearing. Once that suspension, pending a disciplinary hearing is effected, then you have 14 days to have the case heard. There were a lot of things that happened during our board meeting that were a clear violation of our constitution, which we are supposed to uphold, and when you have board members voting to decide the agenda of the meeting, which is not provided for by our constitution, these are the issues we are looking at with my legal team and I can assure you that I will fight until I clear my name and the first port of call is to have this suspension overturned and we will seek recourse, if need be, in the courts of law very soon.”
Hokonya has also hit back, demanding a retraction from The Herald for the story headlined “Referees scandal — Zifa board members implicated”. Failure to get a retraction within seven days, his lawyers, Charles Paul Moyo and Nyoni Legal Practitioners, according to a local daily, will sue the publication for $250 000.
“In the eyes of the ordinary reader our client is seen as being involved in the corruption that is alleged to be part of the Central Region. This is far from the truth. Our client is not involved in any manner with corruption,” read part of the letter.
It would appear battle lines have been drawn and the one who has mastered the art of war will be the last man standing. And when everything has been said and done, football will still remain the beautiful game.
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Online Reporter