The truth is that Mr Razzmatazz Mbalula wants to give new meaning to the word “bribe”, writes Don Makatile.
Johannesburg - Bribe. Whichever way one looks at it, the word always returns this definition: “Money or some other benefit given to a person in power, especially a public official in an effort to cause the person to take a particular action.” There’s even this clearer explanation: “Something offered to induce another to do something.”
A bribe is what an offending motorist hands over to a traffic cop who wants to be persuaded not to write out a ticket.
It is such a part of our psyche that sometimes we use euphemisms to refer to it: “greasing palms” is one.
Just after the scandal broke that South Africa’s 2010 World Cup bid had been rigged, the loquacious minister went gung-ho to declare in public that South Africa did not pay any money.
Fikile Mbalula returned this week to the same audience, perhaps slightly larger and more bemused, to say the $10 million (R1.25 billion) payment had been made with respect to the obligation South Africa felt towards the African diaspora.
In any other country he’d have been made to walk.
But somehow the minister feels he can face the glare of the media cameras and get away with his verbosity.
Our sister newspaper The Star wrote this about the sports minister’s Wednesday plan for his press briefing: “Mbalula sought to dazzle local and international media with his usual rhetoric.”
This was a compliment!
The truth is that Mr Razzmatazz Mbalula, who has proved to be a past master at malapropism, wants to give new meaning to “bribe”.
There’s even a word for it in isiXhosa, the mother tongue of the sports minister.
In whatever language, Mandarin included, this word means one thing – this that has happened between us, as a country, and the help we sought from Concacaf (read Jack Warner) to bring Philip to our shores.
Former Fifa vice-president and Concacaf president Austin Jack Warner is a tainted man, described by some broadcasters as “shady”.
The indictment by the US authorities is damning.
“By May 2004, Jack Warner knew exactly which country he was going to back to host the 2010 World Cup,” Rand Daily Mail Online reported.
“He – and several co-conspirators – cast their vote for South Africa. They would shortly be $10m richer, thanks to an elaborate scheme that involved fiddling with Fifa finances at the expense of the South African taxpayer.”
Anyone with a casual understanding of the English language would be eager to know, if this was not a bribe, then what was.
At the height of his comical best, Mbalula says a bribe “is a ghost that vanishes”. Go figure!
But someone with a full grasp of the meaning of words and insider information is Chuck Blazer, the American who was once the money man at Fifa.
Blazer is familiar with words like swindler, rogue, fraud, money laundering, and tax evasion as he’s been accused variously of these indiscretions throughout his time in football.
Known as Mr Ten Percent, he knows the value of money as each time he made a fortune for Fifa, he took his cut.
But such is his love for money that it is never enough.
He took bribes with the other suits in the Fifa executive to bring the World Cup to South Africa, he confessed earlier in the week.
For a man of his vast vocabulary, who negotiated billion-dollar deals for the world football body, he does not use any other word.
He chooses the right word to describe the act – bribe(s).
Now our filibustering minister would have us believe it was just business as usual, nothing untoward happened.
Believe this, dear 2010 hosts, and you will believe everything, suckers.
* The views expressed here are not necessarily those of Independent Media.
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