The Portfolio Committee on Sport, Arts and Culture adjourned its meeting on Tuesday while efforts were made to locate SAFA President Danny Jordaan, cutting short a briefing that was meant to probe spending on video assistant referee technology. The interruption left Parliament with more questions than answers about who signed off on the money and when SAFA will finally account for it.
That matters now because the committee was already pressing hard on VAR after earlier concerns about how the technology was being paid for. South Africa's recent run to the round of 32 at the FIFA World Cup in the United States, Canada and Mexico added another layer of urgency, with members treating VAR not as a luxury but as part of whether the game can keep pace with the country's ambitions.
Joe McGluwa said the spending was unacceptable and argued that VAR should have been introduced with SAFA and the Premier Soccer League, not in a way that left the department exposed. He said the department was working in isolation, and that approach left both SAFA and the committee vulnerable because the oversight process could not move forward cleanly without the football body in the room.
Gayton McKenzie used the same meeting to push the case for VAR from a different angle, saying the absence of the technology was hurting South Africa's ability to host major football events and draw leading clubs. He said tackles in the PSL were becoming career-ending, bad refereeing was becoming the norm, and that football had moved on, while South Africa had not. He also said smaller leagues in Tanzania and Morocco already had VAR, a comparison that sharpened the sense that the country was behind.
McKenzie said he had written to SAFA and received no response, a line that undercut any suggestion that the department and football administrators were working from the same page. He said he had done everything possible to protect the public purse, but the unanswered letters left the central question untouched: how much was spent, who was responsible, and why the man expected to brief Parliament was not there when the meeting started.
The adjournment means the committee will have to return to the matter with the same unresolved problems still hanging over it. Until Jordaan appears and SAFA answers the letters, the VAR row remains exactly where it was when the chair brought the meeting to a close: under scrutiny, but not yet explained.
