SAFA are furious at the SABC’s failure to broadcast Bafana Bafana’s final Nations Cup qualifier against Equatorial Guinea in Malabo yesterday.

Bafana won the dead rubber 1-0, thanks to a first-half goal from Siphiwe Tshabalala. An incensed Raymond Hack, Safa’s CEO, told the Sunday Times he would be demanding answers from the public broadcaster tomorrow.

But the SABC said their task was made impossible by the Equatoguinean authorities’ refusal to grant visas to 34 of the 39 crew members required to provide a broadcast. Sunday Times football reporter Kgomotso Mokoena was also denied a visa, as were several other South African journalists, along with Bafana’s media and security officials. But Hack said yesterday that the broadcaster should still have obtained the broadcast feed from French TV company Sports Five, who are the rights holders to Caf matches. “I’ve just spoken to someone who is watching the match live in France!” Hack said the SABC were contractually bound to screen every Bafana game. But SABC spokesman Kaizer Kganyago claimed the public broadcaster was innocent.

“The Equatoguinean broadcaster was doing the production of the match, and they were supposed to give us a feed,” said Kganyago. “They came back to us later and said that due to a technical problem they couldn’t give it to us.”

Ironically, ANC president Jacob Zuma was at the match. He is in Malabo to attend the country’s independence celebrations as part of an alliance drive “to forge relationships with liberation movements in Africa”, said ANC media liaison co-ordinator Ishmael Mnisi. Equatorial Guinea’s military ruler Brigadier Teodoro Obiang Nguema rules by decree. He took power in 1979.

But Zuma’s presence did not dissuade Malabo from rejecting most SA visa applications for the match. British mercenary Simon Mann, who attempted to stage a coup in Equatorial Guinea with SA and Angolan soldiers, is imprisoned in Malabo’s notorious Black Beach jail. Since 1996, when oil reserves were found, Equatorial Guinea’s ruling elite have become fabulously wealthy. But most of the country’s people live in desperate poverty.

Soccer Staff

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