File picture of FIFA presidential candidate Prince Ali bin al-Hussein of Jordan.

DPA/Berlin

FIFA presidential candidate Prince Ali bin al-Hussein said yesterday that the emergency election to replace Joseph Blatter must not be delayed.
And the world governing body dished out yet another suspension to a former official by banning South African Lindile Kika from all football for six years.
“With FIFA’s crisis deepening, the organisation needs to move beyond interim leadership and elect an accountable president,” Prince Ali said in a statement.
“Delaying the scheduled election would only postpone needed change and create further instability. It would tell the world that lessons haven’t been learned, that the same backroom deals that have discredited FIFA in the first place continue.”
The election is scheduled for an extraordinary congress on February 26 but the FIFA executive committee meets next week and could decide to delay the poll.
The Jordanian Prince Ali, a former FIFA vice-president, was the sole challenger to Blatter when the Swiss won a fifth term in May’s presidential election. However, just days later the 79-year-old Blatter announced intention to lay down his mandate amid US and Swiss criminal investigations into the organisation.
“The EXCO should not interfere with an ongoing process that was put in place by the ad hoc electoral committee. The election date of February 26 was set three months ago with a clear procedure that meets all of FIFA’s statutory requirements,” Prince Ali said.
“Candidates have had plenty of time to declare and still do. The rules should not be changed after the game has started.”
Cameroonian Issa Hayatou is acting FIFA president as incumbent Blatter was recently suspended for 90 days by the FIFA ethics committee.
UEFA president Michel Platini was also banned for 90 days and the South Korean former FIFA vice-president Chung Mong Joon was suspended for six years. Both had hoped to run for FIFA president at the extraordinary congress.
Platini and Blatter were banned following a Swiss criminal investigation against Blatter launched on September 25.
As part of the investigation, Platini was asked to provide information about a payment of 2 million Swiss francs (about 2 million dollars) signed off by Blatter in 2011.
Former UEFA president Lennart Johansson has hit out at the scandals currently engulfing the game.
“The facts must be placed openly on the table,” he told Germany’s Sport Bild magazine yesterday. “It is a tragedy how the most important sport in the world is being led currently.”
Platini has reportedly appealed against his ban and UEFA’s 54 member associations will meet in Nyon, Switzerland today to discuss developments in the affair.
Should Platini recover to gain the FIFA presidency, it would leave a gap in UEFA that Johansson believes could be filled by German association (DFB) president Wolfgang Niersbach.
He was “very successful with the DFB, perhaps the most important association in the world,” Johannsson said. “He would be an excellent man as UEFA president.”
Niersbach however is refusing to be pushed into declaring a willingness to take on the role, should it become available.
“We must protect UEFA,” he told German weekly Die Zeit in an interview. “I don’t want, and will not, shirk from making my contribution. But this story is certainly not won through the media.”
He added that he believed in the “presumption of innocence” of his long-term friend Platini and pointed out the Frenchman “has not yet been indicted, nothing is proven.”
Later yesterday, the FIFA ethics committee said Kika, formerly an official with the South African Football Association, had been suspended for his part in an alleged match-fixing scandal “in relation to several international friendly matches played in South Africa in 2010.”
Kika’s ban comes a week after Worawi Makudi, the president of the Thailand Football Association and FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke was also suspended by the ethics committee.