The thing about maintaining a lie is that you generally need those involved to stick to the same story. When someone veers from the script, you see, everyone ends up with a little egg to the face.
Last week saw Minister of Sport and Recreation Fikile ‘King of Twitter’ Mbalula issue a wordy statement to the effect of ‘how very dare you America, what $10 million’? No surprises there, we know if you dangle the bait he’ll pretty much snap your hand off.
The egg on face moment came when, over the weekend, Danny Jordaan admitted that South Africa paid the afore-mentioned amount to the organisation run by Jack Warner, one of the FIFA officials indicted by the US Department of Justice. Here’s the BBC:
[Jordaan] is quoted as insisting the money was paid to the Confederation of North, Central American and Caribbean Association Football (Concacaf) in 2008 as South Africa’s contribution towards their football development fund.
The thing is we never actually had the $10 million ourselves, leading to the rather awkward decision that the amount would be deducted from payments due to us from FIFA for hosting the 2010 event. The money was redirected to the Caribbean Football Union, the organisation run by the crooked Warner (pictured above).
What can we gather from all this? Someone didn’t stick to the script, for one, and it looks like Jordaan may be spooked by the lofty threats made by the US investigators. You really shouldn’t have angered the Yanks FIFA, let’s just call that your Pearl Harbour moment.
[source:bbc]
