Football officials shouldn’t eke out a living from lying about match-fixing

Your columnist—remarkably—has a sizeable number of friends for whom match-fixing claims still swoop down on them like an eagle. Startlingly fast, with talons first. After the back page from two Thursdays ago screamed 'match-fixing scandal', I received a here-we-go-again from one of my contemporaries that had a desperate edge to it.

After the genie that cannot be put back in the bottle held my friend's rapt attention, they came to the conclusion that they had been derailed by their own ignorance. Things are not what they seem to be. And they haven’t been for a considerable period, I’m afraid. Instead of outpacing the vice, local football stakeholders have simply chosen to deny their existence. 

The underlying intention of previously ordering inquests into match-fixing claims, extraordinary though it now seems, is to bury incriminating evidence. In fact Fufa's top brass has the temerity to state that the vice is cynically willed into existence by elements interested in Moses Magogo’s job. Such elements, one Fufa official once warily—perhaps defensively—told me, have the right to say nothing at all.

Lest we forget, the genie is out of the bottle. Everything that once gave local football stability and safety—innocence, good intentions—is now lost. Seemingly forever. It is for this reason that people pulling the levers at Mengo are careful enough to stay clear of a pain point that explodes with the slightest brush.

Social media platforms, however, have other ideas. When the latest match-fixing scandal blipped on the radar, there were disturbing video clips to offer ironclad proof that these were unalloyed facts. Previously, everything used to rest on a cornerstone of conjecture. If you were not at a match officiated by the infamous 'Arrow Boys' referees, then you had no incontrovertible evidence. 

The current digital age where the smartphone has turned legions into citizen journalists has changed the dynamic. Strands of match-fixing can be glimpsed in grainy clips shot off cheap Chinese smartphones. These clips are nowadays populated on social networks like Twitter, Facebook, and WhatsApp with a force and speed that remains undiminished.

Clearly this very embodiment of citizen journalism seeks to cleanse language of any trace of privilege, hierarchy, bias, or exclusion that the mainstream—either wittingly or unwittingly—failed to muster. The evidence that past inquests—such as the one in 2003—moved unusually fast to bury is now in the public domain. What now remains is for fans that have local football's best interests at heart to have an honest, sustained conversation. 

The match-fixing vice is one whose durability will continue to show no cracks if all we do is keep wishing it away. News flash: it will not be wished away. Any time-honoured problem-solving approach starts with a forthright admission. The cosmetics intended to improve appearance by creating a facade can only do so much. 

The man in the mirror ought to teach us something. Not just anything, but something profound. The match-fixing whose existence our leaders choose to deny is leaving a devastating trail of destruction behind. The short-termism that encourages denial may keep sponsors coming in with fat dummy cheques, but at what cost? How long before things implode?

Beneath my friend's self-deprecating remark about their ignorance as to the scale of the match-fixing problem is the self-doubt in something once deemed innocuous. Viral video clips that affirmed what my friend digested from this newspaper's back pages will doubtless leave them scarred for life. The worrying thing for Fufa should be that my friend is by no means ploughing a lonely furrow.