Safa president Danny Jordaan.
The South African Football Association (Safa) has postponed its elective congress following a National Executive Committee meeting called this afternoon. The body cited the need to address issues which could ultimately call into question its legitimacy.
The congress was scheduled for this Saturday, March 24.
“The NEC unanimously agreed to postpone the Elective Congress that was scheduled for Saturday, 24 March in order to address any issues that may impact the credibility of the Congress,” Safa said in a statement.
No new date for the elections has yet been set.
This comes just three days after the body released a statement insisting it would go ahead despite an ugly public dispute between its president, Danny Jordaan, and former referee Ace Ncobo.
“The elections will go ahead as agreed by the Safa Congress on Saturday, 24 March 2018 and no other member, outside or within football, can decide otherwise,” it read.
Ncobo has been extremely vocal on issues he believes are prevalent in Safa and proclaimed repeatedly on Twitter that there is zero chance of the congress happening.
Despite reports last week that he had “dropped out” of the presidential race against Jordaan, Ncobo himself insists he was never in it, to begin with.
The list of resolutions adopted by the NEC meeting are:
- Postponing the elections would give the new Electoral Committee (EC) enough time to thrash out all compliance matters.
- The EC must finalise all matters pertaining to the elections.
- All Regions who have not fully completed their electoral process must do so urgently.
- A Congress should be called up urgently to notify members about the above resolutions.
- Individuals who take football cases to the courts of law must be reported to FIFA in line with the world football governing body and, where appropriate, SAFA should recommend that such individuals receive worldwide bans as per FIFA statutes.
- Chief Mwelo Nonkonyana who lost his case in the courts on Tuesday, 20 March 2018 should be banned for life and that SAFA should start processes to recoup all money as a result of these court cases. The amounts run into millions of Rand.
- SAFA writes a full report for FIFA on the above recommendations and on the way forward with regards to the elections.