{UAH} Pojim/WBK: The road to hell passes through Blatter heaven - Comment
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The road to hell passes through Blatter heaven
The raging corruption scandal in world football governing body Fifa that finally led to the resignation of its strongman president Sepp Blatter, revealed a troubling trait in Africa's approach to the world.
We usually side with the thieves or the corrupt, as long as the West is ranged against them. Part of it is historical, and has its roots in the slave trade and colonialism.
Many Africans still distrust the West, and are looking for payback. Anyone who stands up to them like Russia's iron man Vladimir Putin, or Zimbabwe's Robert Mugabe, becomes their hero.
Another reason is anger that though they wish the West ill, their countries still don't fail as spectacularly as ours, like South Sudan, Somalia, Central African Republic, or Libya, have done.
If Scotland breaks away from the UK, there will be no war, and the Premier League will still remain the most popular sport with African fans. If Catalonia seceded from Spain, La Liga will probably become even better.
Thus, in the ultimate act of humiliation, the most anti-Western African politician will still head to a Western hospital when he is struck down by a formidable disease, and steal taxpayers' money to send his children to a British or American university.
But there is something else. Blatter may have surrounded himself with crooked officials, but he did spend a bit on football projects and facilities in Africa. He also pampered African football officials who, like Blatter, used the new money to both line their pockets and entrench themselves.
If Blatter is corrupt, well, he shared with "our people." If African football federation officials were "eating" bribes to vote for him, at least he was paying them. They were not casting dry votes. The suspicion that the British, who have led the criticism of Blatter, are selfish and mean, and will keep all the pork for themselves, runs deep.
In its purer form, it is a redistribution grievance. Perhaps the best case of it in East Africa was that of former Kampala mayor Nasser Sebaggala.
Sebaggala's story began in 1998 when, as a populist man-of-the-people opposition candidate, he won a famous victory as Kampala mayor against a spirited campaign by President Yoweri Museveni's ruling National Resistance Movement.
Two months later, Sebaggala travelled to the US where he was charged with fraud and lying to Customs officials. Specifically, his crime was what the Kampala street commonly referred to as "cheque washing." You clean A's name off, mostly, travellers cheques, put yours in their place so neatly it is hard to detect, then you cash them.
In early 1999, an American court handed Sebaggala a 15-month sentence, but he was paroled in December 1999. Few Ugandans who were in and near Kampala will forget the day of his return.
Only Popes have rivalled Sebaggala in crowd size. He was a hero, a genius who had turned the tables and, as one of his supporters put it, "after a century of robbing Africa, one of us finally stole it back."
So Blatter's eventual departure will be mourned on the continent.
This lack of a race-neutral, ethnic-blind morality is a road that can only take Africa to hell. Many Africans, however, would say, yes, but that road to hell passes through history heaven.
Charles Onyango-Obbo is editor of Mail & Guardian Africa. Twitter: @cobbo3
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