I have always said that sport is harmful to your health. The state president has clearly finally heeded my warnings, first by moving Dr Nkosazana Dlamini-Zuma from the health portfolio (where nobody with any talent can do much good anyway, owing to the massive number of fake sports injuries, such as wife-beating and target practice with live ammunition, swamping the national health system) to the safer terrain of foreign affairs (where the only sporting danger is getting groped by your own ambassador in the Far East).
The other wise move the president made was to transfer the bulky, neck-heavy Ngconde Balfour from sports to correctional services. In rugby parlance, you could call this not so much moving the goalposts, but more like moving the goalie to a position where he can actually catch the ball.
With all the fireworks surrounding our recent football scandals, it sounds like the best place for a good fullback to be. Although traffic might become heavy over the coming weeks, and Ngconde might start to regret the prescribed move from the easygoing world of race-oriented professional rugby, soccer and cricket to organised chain gangs, murder, butty-hopping and generalised skulduggery that run amuck under the present dispensation (just as they did under the old one), it is still a safer place for him to be. Stuff could happen, and be seen to happen, at long last. Ngconde might finally make a name for himself.
The president (with our connivance as stupid, humble voters) has always been moved, it seems, through the much-maligned Scorpions (all of whom are my friends, by the way, and I hope they remember that when tricky times comes [sic]) to do the right thing and get the job done. His Cabinet reshuffles show how eminently adept he is at this.
Sport is an area the president himself is determined not to ignore. Soccer, for example, is in chaos. Referees are getting the whistle blown in their own faces, not by the players who are being blatantly abused, but by world opinion. The Scorpions are running around arresting refs just because they have unexplained and undeclared dollars bulging out of their back pockets as they run up and down the pitch giving out unwarranted yellow cards. Goals are disallowed for no discernable reason, and strikers are declared offside while they are still sitting on the bench, waiting to be called.
Shame, indeed, South African football.
The point I am making (once again) is that sport is bad for people. Everybody knows it. But nobody has the guts to stand up and say it.
The state president — even though, as I have said, he makes some tentative moves to shift the thing around by half-heartedly making new ministerial appointments and tickling the Scorpions on their backs from time to time — is himself not totally prepared to get up and put a red pencil round the whole anti-social, colonial-inspired, life-threatening pursuit and call a halt to it.
Why?
The answer can only lie in the self-same government’s dogged commitment to what it calls Gear (in other words, Get Euros and Dollars Over Here, whatever the human cost). Social morality has long been dropped from the sub-clauses of the Freedom Charter. In fact, the Freedom Charter itself, as many other commentators have pointed out, has itself long been dropped from national discourse, as if it was something from the age of dinosaurs and nursery rhymes.
Sport and corporate sponsorship have taken its place, leaving the likes of Danny Jordaan and Attie van Tonder to rule the roost.
Who are these people? Where do they come from? How did they become so prominent in national life? Why are they all suddenly writing best-selling autobiographies? Who reads them anyway?
Anyway, corporate sponsorship of sport is what appears to make this country tick officially nowadays. Get your head round it.
What bothers me, as a snoozing, occasional television-watching, very occasional hostage ringside observer, is how they have all got away with it for so long. According to usually reliable newspaper sources, referees who are now being brought to book under the cunning, stealthy, vicious programme of the Scorpions have actually been under scrutiny for several years. Their shenanigans have been noted and reported many times over. They have been taken to court and threatened with a klap round the head, and yet they have still walked back on to the grass and blown the opening whistle as if they were Joan of Arc — not that any of them would have known Joan of Arc if she had walked up and given them a well-deserved smack on the nose anyway.
Soccer players are notorious for falling over and crying ‘foul” at the drop of a hat. They are a bunch of fat-thighed namby-pamby ninnies who should have stayed at home with their nannies who fed them, making them overgrown and over-testosteroned with nowhere to go. David Beckham is one. The latest transfer from Real Madrid to Birmingham, or wherever it is, black as your hat and with an unpronounceable West African name, is another. The whole thing is an expensive farce.
But I can see the referee’s point of view. If all these oversized clowns can be allowed to carry on their antics on the field and get away with it, why shouldn’t the ref get a slice of the action?
I suppose the answer is that someone has to set a standard of fair play. And that someone is generally the muggins called the ref.
But the world being what it now is, with invasions of Iraq and prevarications over the world’s real issues, such as Darfur in Sudan and continuous conflagrations in the Democratic Republic of Congo, those who are placed to provide a real leadership role, play the referee’s job, as it were, are increasingly seen to be partisan, self-seeking and, frankly, money-grubbing.
Why should ‘sport” be any different? So who has the right to blow the whistle on the refs? Who has the right to cast the first stone?
Sport is politics. Politics is merely sport.