THE NAME OF THE GAME: CORRUPTION

Almost a week to the first ever World Cup in the Middle East, taking place in the natural gas reserves and oil reserves rich country of Qatar, American streaming giant Netflix released FIFA Uncovered, a four-part documentary highlighting the global scale of the corruption that was happening at Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA), the world football governing body. HOW CONVENIENT? 

Throughout the documentary – and of course from the discourse that emerged after the awarding of Qatar to host the 2022 World Cup – one country comes out as ‘The One’ which should have been given the hosting. I will leave this to you to find out on your own. However, here is what I have leant from this documentary:

Blatter was never loved by his people in Europe

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In 2002 FIFA presidential election, UEFA supported Issa Hayatou's – the then Cameroonian football executive and president of the Confederation of African Football - FIFA presidency ambitions because they were just looking for someone they could control after failing to control Blatter. Isn’t this hypocrisy

Was FIFA corrupt?

Certainly. As late the Lucky Dube concisely had put it in his song titled Freedom, too much power in one man’s hands is dangerous. You can have such a huge organization that is only accountable to itself with carte blanche to make decision. As a result, corruption was institutionalized in the organization.

Prior to the 2002 FIFA election, Emmanuel Maradas - who was Blatter's advisor Africa and behind African Soccer Magazine - claimed that Sepp gave him money which he distributed to all Council of Southern Africa Football Associations (COSAFA) members to help them build Football Association (FA) Headquarters to the tune of $400,000 each. But from the documentary, this money was never audited nor were the FAs requested to report back. How much did our own Football House cost to build?

Did Blatter sell the World Cup to Qatar?

According to this documentary, Blatter was also against giving the World Cup to Qatar because inter alia, Qatar’s lacked the football culture and enough infrastructure to hold a world cup as all the stadiums and hotels had to be built from nothing. He was also betrayed like everyone else that feels betrayed. The real villains are Jack Warner (CACACAF), Issa Hayatou (CAF), Michel Platini (UEFA) and Nicolas Leoz (CONMEBOL) who used their influence to tip the scale towards Qatar. Muhammad Bin Hammam (AFC), on the other hand, was just being patriotic. He was the son of the soil.

When some country lost the 2022 World Cup hosting rights, they went flat to bring FIFA down. Would we have known about FIFA's corruption if they had won? I leave you to answer this. Corruption is a consumer satisfied crime. When both sides are happy, everything's cool. We mask corruption with nice names when we are involved: gifts, blessings, answered prayers, deserving and all sorts.

Causes of corruption

There are many causes of corruption but in this documentary, they are twofold: the greedy and insatiable appetite of those in privileged position. And poverty.

I want to talk about the latter since the former is well known with several examples from people hoarding money in their homes and fields to people acquiring property within a short period without a clear financial trail.

Poverty is rarely seen as an enabler of corruption. While poverty in the north is caused by greed, corruption in the south is mainly caused by poverty. One thing that is also clear from this documentary is that to fight corruption, you have to fight poverty first. The documentary offers reasons as to why vote buying may have influenced in Qatar hosting this world cup:

• Qatar sponsored the CAF conference that was held in Luanda, Angola.
• Qatar paid $1,500,000 to Cameroon, Nigeria and Côte d'Ivoire FAs presidents for ‘their countries’ football development.’
• Qatar gave cheap oil deals to a number of countries.
• Qatar Airways started flying to new destinations where they didn’t initially go before their world cup campaign was launched.
• Politicians at the highest level of governments and politics would see this as an opportunity to push for their ambitions. Leaders like Nicolas Sarkozy and Lula da Silva got involved to broker vote buying.

To be clear, I’m not trying to be a corruption apologist. Far from it. I believe that corruption is a crime against humanity and should be treated as such. But what I’m trying to dispel is the perception that the South is more corrupt than the North. And yet it’s the banks in the North that advices how to avoid tax and hugely benefits from corrupt transaction from the South.

Is the anger towards Qatar justifiable?

Not at all. Like South Africa which ended up paying $10,000,000 in the name of Diaspora Funds (whatever that meant) to Jack Warner in exchange for votes to host the 2010 World Cup, Qatar was also taken advantage of by these players of the game. Qatar may have parted away with so much looking at how many people and governments they had to engage to win the 2022 World Cup hosting rights.

Why are people angry at Qatar then? Because of how political this World Cup has been, its difficulty to really ascertain the validity of the human rights abuse claims. We should never have allowed politics to infiltrate football, we have created a monster that will be impossible to slay. In this case, anger stems more from those that feel entitled to have hosted this World Cup. It is called transferred aggression or misdirected aggression. This happens when a person feels threatened or upset by an outside stimulus but is unable to focus their animosity on the stimulus. Whoever is weakest and closest to the offender may be the target of their aggression. This is Qatar’s position since FIFA has been ‘cleared’. South Africa suffered a similar bad publicity leading to the 2010 World Cup. And so, did Brazil in 2014 and Russia in 2018.

Next week, the global showpiece begins in Qatar. We will be watching as we whet our appetite for the 2026 World Cup which will be held by Canada, Mexico, and the United States. Coincident?