CApe Town - Disgraced former Fifa president Sepp Blatter forced South Africa’s hand to build the R4.4 billion Cape Town Stadium in Green Point instead of Athlone, according to journalist and author Ray Hartley.
He was speaking about his new book The Big Fix: How South Africa stole the World Cup on the second day of the Franschhoek Literary Festival on Saturday. Hartley said then-ANC premier Ebrahim Rasool wanted the new stadium to be built in Athlone – if one was built at all, but Blatter insisted Green Point was “beautiful” and the “stadium must be here”.
This was despite the fact Fifa had originally accepted increasing the size of Newlands rugby stadium with an extra row of seats to cater for Cape Town soccer matches at a cost of R400 million.
“(The result) is that ratepayers will be paying for the stadium for a long time.”
Hartley’s book charts the history of how South Africa was awarded the 2010 Fifa World Cup and the later revelations of an alleged $10m bribe paid by South African officials to former Fifa vice-president Jack Warner to secure votes.
Hartley said while the payment and the fall from grace of a host of top officials, including Blatter and Warner, made world headlines last year, he had always been “uncomfortable” about other instances of wrongdoing, including match-fixing, collusion by construction companies and even allegations of murder.
These, he said, were at the time overlooked by an overwhelming “surge of patriotism” that gripped the country.
The murder case is that of Jimmy Mohlala, a senior ANC official and speaker of the Mbombela municipality who was shot dead outside his home by hitmen in 2009. Hartley said this took place after Mohlala “stumbled across fishy things” related to the construction of the 40 929-seat stadium Mbombela Stadium in Nelspruit.
“To this day, no one has been arrested,” he said.
Other chapters in his book refer to collusion by construction companies, who “like the Sopranos” got together to divvy up who built which stadium (and later paid a collective R1.4bn fine) and an embarrassing series of fixed friendly soccer matches in the run-up to the competition. Five matches, he said, were fixed by betting syndicates, who “proposed” to the South African Football Association (Safa) that they use their referees.
Former head of Safa referees Steve Goddard, who got wind of the match-fixing, at one stage even locked up a bent referee in a room in the stadium, to stop him officiating. Despite his whistle-blowing, Goddard was banned by Fifa for two years.
Weekend Argus