February 26 2004. Johannesburg. The date and place where the seeds of the ongoing match-fixing scandal in South African football were sown.
The event was a meeting of the Premier Soccer League (PSL) executive committee — made up of club chairmen and other club officials — at the PSL headquarters in Doornfontein. The meeting was called to discuss a spate of bad refereeing decisions.
The committee invited two officials of the South African Football Association (Safa), chair of the National Referees Committee Professor Lesole Gadinabokao and his deputy, Mahomed Mubarak, to express their concern about increasing allegations of referee corruption.
The PSL executives accused Safa of giving the league corrupt referees. The football controlling body counterclaimed that the club owners were guilty of corrupting the referees by dangling carrots that poorly paid referees could not turn down.
The Safa officials told the meeting they would call in the police for a proper investigation. Club owners agreed to the proposal. “They expected that as usual an investigation would be called for, names would be mentioned, but nothing substantial would arise from it,” an official close to the investigation has told the Mail & Guardian.
By “as usual” the official was referring to the Motimele report into matchfixing, commissioned by the PSL and carried out by advocate McCaps Motimele in 1998. It has never seen the light of day, nor have any of its recommendations been made known.
Both Safa and PSL officials have repeatedly said they could not release the report because it is defamatory to some individuals; and that people who had made allegations before the commission were reluctant to make sworn affidavits backing what they had told Motimele.
Elements of another report, by Judge Benjamin (Bobby) Pickard, were also largely ignored. The Pickard commission was established in 1996 by the then minister of sport, the late Steve Tshwete, to investigate allegations of corruption in South African soccer.
It recommended that because Safa national executive committee positions were honorary its members should not be remunerated. However, the Safa 2002 financial statements showed that NEC officials were paid R3,8-million that year.
Judge Pickard also recommended club officials not hold any executive offices within Safa. That too was overlooked, with Orlando Pirates chairperson Irvin Khoza holding the vice-chairpersonship of Safa until his resignation in January.
Another probe initiated by Safa and carried out by the police between 2001 and 2002 proved inconclusive and no further action was taken.
But contrary to club officials’ expectations, the police probe discussed at the February meeting in Doornfontein turned into a whole new ball game.
Safa president Molefi Oliphant, speaking from Cairo where he is attending a Confederation of African Football meeting, told the M&G the February meeting was not the first where matchfixing allegations were discussed. Poor refereeing was the topic at three earlier Safa national executive meetings between January and May last year.
“The decision [to investigate] was because of the general outcry that the standard of refereeing was not satisfactory and there was something untoward going on,” he said.
A football official who attended the February meeting, and who has asked to remain anonymous, confirmed that the meeting “convinced everyone that something needed to be done about alleged matchfixing and the inconsistent refereeing”.
According to one soccer official, club chairpersons were told “there can never be corrupt referees without corrupt club officials. There has to be a giver and a taker.”
But, said one football official, “that does not mean that if [the February] meeting had not taken place, nothing would have been done”.