In Search of Accountability
The most critical trade unions – the Association of Mineworkers and Construction Union and the National Union of Metalworkers of South Africa – along with the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) political party, and radical civil society (e.g. Right2Know and the Marikana Support Committee) are bravely attempting to shift public opinion to tackle such sustained corporate corruption. But while the link between crony capitalism and state power is no better personified than by Ramaphosa, he retains the hope of many in big business (and even some liberals) for a cleaner, less clumsily-corrupt ruling party after Zuma goes.
In other words, accountability for this mess will be very hard to achieve. Just as appalling as Bletter’s FIFA re-election on Friday, on the day before, Danny Jordaan was selected as ruling-party mayor of the Nelson Mandela Metro (Port Elizabeth). The most sleazy of South African municipalities, Durban, is fairly certain to win the 2022 Commonwealth Games in three months’ time, and will bid for the 2024 Olympic Games. Mbeki will be given an even larger platform to pretend he wants to halt financial corruption.
The need for non-accountability goes to the very top of South Africa. The most visible personal case of graft was unveiled the same day the FIFA bosses were arrested: Zuma’s upgrade of his rural Nkandla village palace. It cost taxpayers more than $20 million, and catalysed a “Pay Back the Money!” meme that many leftist critics – notably the EFF leader Julius Malema – regularly use against Zuma. But arguing Zuma does not have to pay back any money, the police minister last Wednesday offered unintendedly hilarious excuses for unjustifiable state security funding on cattle and chicken facilities and a swimming pool (to fight potential fires).
A desperately defensive Pretoria government’s investment in the myth of 2010’s success is too great to allow its citizenry to pull the strings that unravel the corruption jersey. But it’s just as fragile a fabric as the wool chosen by Washington and the IFF Panel to pull over society’s eyes. Those strings would quickly entangle the likes of Blatter, Warner, Blazer, Mbeki, Zuma, Ramaphosa, Manuel, Jordaan, Glasenberg, Lynch and a host of their banker buddies. Their challenge is to gracefully step out of the tangle; ours is to pull the strings tighter, tripping them up (after all, the first three have already fallen harder than anyone expected), and then knitting some entirely new socio-economic and sporting systems as rapidly and as robustly as possible.
This article previously appeared in TeleSUR.
Article Appeared @http://www.blackagendareport.com/soccer_corruption_Africa_illicit_financial_flows