Jordaan's FIFA Council withdrawal raising suspicion

The unofficial stance is that Jordaan pulled out of the race in order to focus on to trying to make it onto the Confederation of Africa Football (CAF) executive committee.
 
It’s the timing however of Jordaan’s withdrawal that is causing people to ask questions – he pulled out of the race only a few hours before FIFA were to publish the results of their integrity checks into all candidates.
 
Making the situation all the more suspicious is the fact that another candidate – Egypt’s Hany Abu Rida – was only recently disqualified from running after Jordaan had argued with CAF that the north African should not be allowed to compete as he had already entered into the category reserved for candidates from Arabic-speaking countries.
 
Chabur Goc Alei of South Sudan also took himself out of the running at a late stage, which meant that with two positions up for grabs on the FIFA council (in the Open category), Jordaan seemed a certainty to be elected alongside the only other remaining candidate, Almamy Kabele Camara of Guinea.
 
An additional vote will now be held in order to determine who joins Camara in the Open section.
 
In total, Africa will have seven places on the FIFA council, with the candidates set to be finalised in Ethiopia next week. One of those places is for the winner of the CAF presidential election, two are in the Open category, one is for a female candidate, and three are for the different language (English, French, Arabic) groups category. 
 
With Jordaan having been so near to winning the FIFA seat it was believed he aspired to only to mysteriously pull out without giving any reasons, the speculation is that the SAFA boss has something to hide. The obvious assumption is that it is in connection with the bribery allegations surrounding South Africa’s 2010 World Cup bid.
 
This followed an investigation in 2015 by the US Department of Justice into corruption among FIFA executives and led to a host of senior officials including then-president Sepp Blatter losing their jobs and facing charges.
 
It was also found that two (un-named) South African officials, one of them believed to have been Jordaan, had in 2008 arranged to make a payment of $10 million to former FIFA vice president and CONCACAF president Jack Warner, who has subsequently been banned for life from football.
 
South African Sports minister Fikile Mbalula admitted to the payment but claimed the money was for a football development project supporting an African diaspora program in Trinidad in the Caribbean, rather than a bribe to try and secure the hosting rights for the 2010 World Cup.
 

For a developing like South Africa which could do with more money pumped into its own football structures, the giving away of well over R100 million to a country on another continent makes very little sense.