OPINION: Disgraced Tokyo ‘dies wearing his boots’

So, I said from the onset that I would swallow my coat if Tokyo Sexwale could garner even a single vote in his bid for the Fifa presidency.

I am happy to say I was saved the blushes, and poor Sexwale never even got a single vote in the Fifa presidential elections which were held in Zurich, Switzerland, on 26 February.

Gianni Infantino, a Swiss-Italian national and secretary-general of the Union of European Football Associations (UEFA) was elected as the 9th Fifa president with 115 votes gained of a total of 207. Sexwale didn’t feature and he was pitifully disgraced at the Fifa polls.

I am sure, stubborn as he is when it comes to taking advice, he now remembers the words of the South African Football Association’s (Safa) call on him to gracefully call it quits to avoid embarrassment.

Sexwale, a football outsider, stood the least chance of being elected after his own football governing body, Safa, did not endorse his candidature and urged the former ANC struggle icon to drop his bid.

Sexwale then ran to the Confederation of African Football (Caf) in the hope that the continental mother body would endorse him but also failed in his bid when Caf told him their preferred candidate was Salman Bin Ibrahim Al-Khalifa of Bahrain.

But the ‘never say die’ Sexwale would not entertain any of that as he carried on with his ambition to lead Fifa. He packed his bags and left South Africa on 23 February for Zurich after telling reporters he was not giving up the ‘Fifa ghost’.

Saying he was unsure if even his own country’s football association would vote for him, Sexwale insisted voting took place privately and no one knows what happens there. “If you ask me how many associations have said they will back me, quite a number have said they will not,” Sexwale admitted.

Sexwale, 62, described himself as “a fighter that would die wearing his boots”.

But like the chameleon he is, Sexwale tried in the 11th hour to change his colours to suit the environment when the going got tough and declared he was open to ‘alliances’. Like he said himself, Tokyo finally paid the ultimate price of not listening to advice and “died while he wearing his boots”.

Like his colleagues in the African National Congress (ANC), Sexwale never listens to his own people and the Fifa elections have just taught him how important it is to put one’s ear to the ground to catch the pounding hooves of a herd of galloping buffalo.