Latest news with #DannyJordaan
The Herald
2 days ago
- General
- The Herald
Jordaan promises MPs ‘accountability' as Tseka named as culprit for Bafana yellow card bungle
Bafana Bafana team manager Vincent Tseka was named by fuming MPs in parliament's sports portfolio committee as the official responsible for missing that Teboho Mokoena was suspended in SA's 2026 Fifa World Cup qualifier against Lesotho. The MPs demanded to know why the SA Football Association (Safa), reporting to the committee on Tuesday, has not taken action against Tseka . Mokoena played in the 2-0 win over Lesotho in Polokwane in March as Bafana's team management missed the midfielder having accumulated two yellow cards in previous matches, meaning he should have been suspended. The huge gaff seems certain to result in Group C leaders SA losing three points, which will endanger their chances of a first World Cup qualification other than as hosts since 2002. However, Tseka received a fair degree of cover from Safa head of legal Poobalan Govindasamy and president Danny Jordaan, who told MPs they were waiting for Fifa's final decision concluding their internal investigation.
News24
2 days ago
- Business
- News24
Five key takeaways from Safa's financial statements presented in Parliament
Safa is technically insolvent, with liabilities exceeding assets by R141 million and a loss of R5.4 million for the year ended June 2024. The football association's officials were summoned to Parliament to explain their dire finances. The turnaround strategy includes implementing club licensing fees and registration fees for players and officials. On Tuesday, Safa laid bare its depressing audited annual financial statements before the sport, arts and culture portfolio committee in Parliament in Cape Town. The Safa delegation, led by its president Danny Jordaan, CEO Lydia Monyepao and chief financial officer Gronie Hluyo, revealed the association was technically insolvent and was facing a bleak future if it could not turn its finances around. Here are five takeaways from Safa's presentation. Safa is still technically insolvent The cash-strapped Safa reported an operating loss of R5.4 million for the year ended 30 June 2024. The association attributed the losses to a lack of funding for junior national teams, preparation costs for Banyana Banyana's 2023 Fifa Women's World Cup and Bafana Bafana's Afcon participation. More concerning is that Safa's liabilities exceed its assets by R141.2 million, which has created cash flow problems. Safa annual financial statement No bonus for Amajita's Under-20 Afcon-winning coach Despite leading Amajita to the Under-20 continental title last month, Monyepao said head coach Raymond Mdaka would not get a bonus for his monumental achievement. Last month, the former Safa technical director, Walter Steenbok, revealed Mdaka was on a one-year contract and earning R25 000 monthly. However, Monyepao refused to disclose Mdaka's salary when committee member Makashule Gana asked her to confirm Steenbok's claims. 'You are going to disclose,' said Gana, who was supported by committee chairperson Joe McGluwa. 'You must respond to that question and you are going to respond to it,' asserted McGluwa. 'It's not true,' Monyepao insisted. Monyepao said Mdaka earned more than R30 000 but not more than R50 000. She confirmed that Bafana head coach Hugo Broos earned more than R1 million a month. Monyepao also confirmed that Amajita travelled by bus for more than 15 hours to the tournament in Mozambique. Financial turnaround strategy Safa is implementing a club licensing and membership programme that will see its clubs pay a licence fee of between R300 and R1 million. All the players, coaches and officials will be required to register and pay a fee ranging from R20 to R5 000. 'The expected revenue to be generated in the first year from this programme is R17.8 million (next year) and it will grow to more than R50 million in 2030. 'There is a possibility of implementing this programme in this financial year and, if this materialises, an estimated revenue of R10 million will be generated,' according to the report. These amounts do not include the PSL clubs, which may add another R10 million in the first year, growing to R30 million by 2030. READ: Middendorp's open letter to PSL and Safa: 'NFD has lost integrity; please act' 'This programme will also require all the local football associations and regional football associations, including their executive members, to register. This will generate an additional R2.5 million for the association.' Safa added in the national executive committee report that these measures were part of the association's efforts to improve its dire financial position. The association also bemoaned that its junior national teams did not have sponsors. Safa added that it expected Bafana and Banyana to bring in a total of about R250 million if they qualified for their respective World Cups and Afcon tournaments. Safa wants a share of PSL revenue Safa finance chief Hluyo said the association wanted a share of the PSL's revenue. Danny Jordaan's U-turn After winning his third but controversy-marred term in June 2022, Jordaan said then that he would not seek another term. But it seems that he has had a change of heart and wants to cling to power. Rise Mzansi MP Gana asked Jordaan whether he would avail himself to serve another four-year when his current third term ended next year. Jordaan, who was first elected Safa president in September 2013, was non-committal. Pushed by Gana, Jordaan said he served at the mercy of the Safa members. Asked if he would stand again for a fourth term, Jordaan said: 'I don't know if they will nominate me or not. The nominations process is not yet open.' Pressed further to answer yes or no, Jordaan insisted: 'I don't know.' Jordaan was reminded of what his said in June 2022 shortly after his re-election. 'This is my last term,' Jordaan said three years. On Tuesday, Jordaan said 'did I say that', when asked whether he was reneging on his statement. 'Yes, you did,' charged Gana.
Daily Maverick
2 days ago
- Business
- Daily Maverick
Latest visit to Parliament paints grim picture of the finances of Danny Jordaan's Safa
There were two key takeaways from the South African Football Association's appearance before Parliament: its dire financial situation and its president, Danny Jordaan, hinting that he will run for a fourth term in 2026. The South African Football Association (Safa) is in financial trouble. That was one of the key takeaways from the federation's appearance before Parliament's sport, arts and culture oversight committee. During the routine visit to Parliament on Tuesday, 3 June Safa spoke about the financial struggles it is facing. The association's chief financial officer, Gronie Hluyo, said it is in debt, with its current liabilities exceeding its assets by R141-million. Over the past few months in particular Safa has battled to pay employees and service providers on time. Even senior national team players have sometimes had to wait it out for their match fees. In December 2024, the Department of Sport bailed out Safa from a financial quagmire by approving a R5-million advance from the association's annual government grant. However, in the long-term Safa still finds itself in a precarious financial position. Cashflow quagmire Hluyo said the reasons for this deficit included the adoption of gender parity policies for the senior teams, Bafana Bafana and Banyana Banyana. He said that despite this commitment from Safa, the limited sponsors approaching them were primarily interested in backing the men's team. The financial officer, who stands accused of fraud within Safa – alongside the federation's president Danny Jordaan and public relations company boss Trevor Neethling – told Parliament that Safa's cashflow struggles were primarily due to the organisation battling to attract sponsors. The latter situation, he submitted, is a direct result of the constantly negative publicity Safa receives in the media. According to Hluyo, one of the most important components in Safa balancing its books is the federation finishing the renovation of the Fun Valley Resort, which it bought in 2015. The vision was to transform the site into Safa's official national technical centre, thereby reducing costs significantly. 'We bought a place called Fun Valley, which we are developing into a national technical centre. We are in the process of constructing that national technical centre. Once that is complete it will result in a lot of cost saving for Safa, because our teams will be staying at the national technical centre and training there,' Hluyo said. 'Currently our biggest costs are flights, accommodation and player remuneration. So, if we can reduce the accommodation costs, that will help quite a lot. However, we need funders in order to complete the construction of the technical centre.' Safa paid R65-million for Fun Valley, which is in Johannesburg South. However, the purchase has been marred by controversy because of discrepancies in property valuations. It has always been said that Safa paid much more than what the property was worth. In 2023, Hluyo told the media that the association needed about R600-million to complete all the construction. But with its dire financial situation, as well as corporate companies shunning Safa due to the constant negative publicity, it's unclear where the money will come from. Negative publicity Hluyo also said Safa is also on the market for a public relations company to spruce up its image, owing to what Jordaan labelled a 'campaign' to derail the association, by both external and internal people. 'The campaign is intended to drive away the sponsors… It only happens to football. It won't happen to rugby and cricket. This is a political campaign and vicious campaign, but we will stand our ground. We will deliver the football that people want in this country. We are not afraid, we've seen worse,' Jordaan said. Indeed, Safa regularly pumps out statements disputing one thing or another – from allegations that Jordaan is running the association like a cartel, to him ousting all those who challenge his authority. It's a long list. Jordaan's former vice-president, Ria Ledwaba, once said of the Safa boss: 'As soon as you do not agree with the president, you are enemy number one.' Jordaan has consistently denied the allegations against him. Vehemently. The 73-year-old former Nelson Mandela Bay mayor has also argued that if he was as despicable as he is always portrayed in the public domain, then members of the association would not continuously entrust him to lead it. Another term? Jordaan is currently serving a third term as Safa boss. He was first elected in 2013 and his current four-year term began in 2022. Asked in Parliament whether he would ever consider voluntarily stepping down from his position, especially in light of the negative publicity in Safa which can be directly linked to him, Jordaan said no. 'In any position, in a democracy, you cannot give yourself a position. You cannot decide when you stay and when you go. That is the responsibility of our 52 regions, they will take that decision. It's not for me to say I want to be a president [or not]. I never said that to them. So, they will decide what they want to do,' Jordaan said. This is in stark contrast to what he said after his re-election in a landslide victory three years ago, when he implied that he had not wanted to run for president again and had only done so to groom a successor after Safa members had implored him to do so. 'That's one of the reasons why [some of the] members said 'you can't just drop the ball and go, you must have a succession plan'. I heard them and we agreed. It is not as if I woke up one morning and said I want a third term. That is far from the truth. I had accepted that I'd made my contribution,' Jordaan said in 2022. Asked about those remarks in Parliament on Tuesday, Jordaan appeared perplexed. He said: 'When did I say this?… Members must nominate. We have to wait and see. I don't know whether they'll nominate me or not.' With a large number of Safa's national executive committee members said to be personally benefiting, one way or the other, from Jordaan's extended stay at the association, he is likely to be nominated again – even though his presence is clearly a setback, in a number of ways, for the association. DM
TimesLIVE
3 days ago
- Business
- TimesLIVE
‘We have to wait and see': Jordaan dribbles parliament on fourth term at Safa
South African Football Association (Safa) president Danny Jordaan dribbled past some fuming members of parliament's portfolio committee on sports, arts and culture on Tuesday when asked if he will stand for a fourth term in Safa's election next year. Jordaan has been president of Safa since 2013, serving almost three terms in an association that admitted it is battling cash flow issues, presenting a financial year statement for 2023-2024 in its presentation to the committee that showed a loss of R5.4m. Gronie Hluyo, who has been Safa's CFO since 2007, said part of the reason the association reported a deficit is because most of its national teams, especially the juniors, are not attracting sponsors, meaning the cash-strapped association has to fund them from its pockets. The sports ministry had to bail Safa out for R5m towards the end of last year when it failed to pay the bonuses of Bafana Bafana and Banyana Banyana players. Safa will repay that debt in the next financial year through receiving R1.7m instead of the normal annual grant of R6.7m from the department of sports.
Daily Maverick
28-05-2025
- Politics
- Daily Maverick
Pay less attention to presidents and premiers and focus on mayors, they matter way more
We pay way too much attention to presidents and premiers and not nearly enough to mayors. Nothing that the first two ever do can directly affect me this afternoon, this week or even this year. In fact, most of what they do never touches sides in real terms. But the mayor can change my life within an hour. Is the power restored after an outage, the gushing water breach in the road stemmed, the blocked sewage pipe cleared, the rubbish collected, the storm-felled tree across the highway removed, the fire brigade turning up timeously? If I lived in a flooded township, it would be the mayor who could ensure that emergency help was available and that it arrived. Competence and incorruptibility at municipal level make a massive difference. And the converse is true. The destruction caused by incompetence and dishonesty at a municipality is both enormous and immediate. And, the converse of the converse is that the opportunity for rapid renewal is immense. Just see what the DA's energetic Chris Pappas has achieved inside a mere 12 months as mayor of uMngeni. Aside from Cape Town, excellently served for the past three years by a hard-working, pragmatic and highly functional mayor in Geordin Hill-Lewis, our track record of governance in major metropoles is abysmal. Johannesburg is the well-publicised poster child in this regard – eight mayors in six years – but the rest are no better. Nelson Mandela Bay has had 10 mayors in 10 years, including Danny Jordaan for a brief time, and they've had an astonishing 15 city managers in five years. Tshwane has had six mayors in six years and Mangaung five in five. eThekwini's recent mayoral list includes Zandile Gumede, investigated by the Hawks in connection with fraud (like fake employment creation), money laundering and corruption. There was a time when our city mayors did not matter that much. They were fundamentally ceremonial and got to prance about with a silly chain around their necks. Often, they rotated on an annual basis. But nowadays they are elected, executive leaders of widespread metropoles with massive budgets and the capacity to inflict misery on millions through exorbitant rates and minimal service delivery. This accurately reflects the fact that the English word 'mayor' is derived from the Latin 'magnus', meaning great or powerful, via the French derivation of 'maire'. (Before that, their equivalents in Britain were known as 'portreeves' … which, in my view, is a far superior name.) Stepping stone to higher office All of this is why the municipal elections at the end of next year should matter to everyone as much as, if not more than, the national ones in 2029. The candidates should be the brightest and best that parties can find, instead of burying their limited talent on the dozing backbenches of Parliament or in the Cabinet. The testing experience of being a successful mayor ideally should be a training ground and a stepping stone for national office. Helen Zille, whose zeal and attention to detail best suited her to the on-the-ground work of being Cape Town mayor for three years, is a local example of this playing out. So, to a lesser extent, is Herman Mashaba's transition from DA Joburg mayor to national shapeshifting irritant. And there are rumours, which he denies, that Hill-Lewis will take a shot at John Steenhuisen's DA leadership job next April. The ANC tends to go the other way — deploying downwards from the Cabinet to dysfunctional metropoles without any success. Maybe Parks Tau, who somehow survived five years as Johannesburg mayor from 2011 and is now an up-and-coming trade minister, can break that mould. The French provide the best example of this kind of leadership production line. Five of its last eight presidents were mayors at some point in their careers, as were 18 of the country's last 24 prime ministers. In London, there have been three mayors under the new structure. One, Boris Johnson, became prime minister. The incumbent, Sadiq Khan, is a good bet to follow him to Downing Street someday. In the US, the sanest, sharpest and most promising figure in their tainted political landscape is Pete Buttigieg, who is known as Mayor Pete because of his eight years' running the small city of South Bend, Indiana. But no mayor of a major American metropole has ever become president unless you count Grover Cleveland's brief experience in 1881 as the boss of Buffalo (and two others in the even more distant past who ran small towns). Possibly more relevant to us is Turkiye, where their authoritarian president, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, first made his name as mayor of Istanbul and is now doing his best to illegitimately thwart his rising rival Ekrem Imamoglu, who is the current mayor of that fabulous city. Or Mexico, where their first female president, Claudia Sheinbaum, came to everyone's attention as a savvy and strong mayor of its sprawling capital, Mexico City. There's a very strange example in the Philippines where the highly controversial Rodrigo Duterte served seven terms as a 'law and order' mayor of Davao City before becoming a wild and often lawless president, and then being arrested by the International Criminal Court on charges of crimes against humanity, murder, torture and rape. He is currently in detention in The Hague, awaiting trial from where, in absentia, he has successfully run once again for election as Davao City mayor. I am not claiming that being a mayor automatically ensures great national leadership skills – hello Boris! – but it is a real job affecting real people in real time. You face consequences and you get to understand the full implications of actions (or inactions) coming down to you from the national or provincial levels. If you start political life up in the rarified air of Cabinet meetings and Parliament, where the indirect tools of words, policies, legislation and budget allocations are all you have to work with, you may never really get what truly matters — which is the garbage being collected tomorrow and the potholes being filled yesterday. DM
