Impact of the World Cup
CHRIS CHIVERS
If only it could be more than a game
While most South Africans burst with pride as hosts of next month’s 2010 World Cup, precious little of the billions it generates will come their way. Instead, it is the long-term committed who are tackling the country’s manifold social and economic ills
of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 when I attended a recent screening. But it certainly didn’t need satirical contributions of a scripted nature.
F
About half way through the 75-minute film, Cape Town’s Labia Cinema erupted with laughter as Danny Jordaan, South Africa’s local organising committee chief executive, responded when challenged directly about the financing of 2010. The interviewer suggested that stadiums in remote areas – as is the case for the one at Nelspruit, built at a cost of 1.05 billion rand (£96 million) near the Mozambique border – or so large – as that built at Greenpoint in Cape Town for more than 4.4 billion rand (£403m) – that they cannot possibly ever be economically viable, simply take away much needed money from schools, hospitals and job creation. This, in a country where there are more than 1,000 deaths a day from HIV/Aids, with unemployment running at between 25 and 40 per cent, and where con- sistent questions about the lack of service delivery are being raised. The case seems pretty incontrovertible to most people. Indeed, it’s been further sub- stantiated in a hard-hitting collection of essays,
Player and Referee: Conflicting interests and the 2010 FIFA World Cup™, just published
by South Africa’s Institute for Security Studies and edited by Collette Schulz Herzenberg. But Jordaan refuted the mass of socio-eco- nomic evidence set against this with an astonishing one-liner: “We want children coming to the matches to dream of winning the World Cup. They don’t dream of going to hospital.” Presumably building medical facil- ities is a luxury where new stadiums – the Mbombela stadium in Nelspruit displacing a school as well as a township (they still don’t know where they are to go) and hosting just four games during the tournament – are absolutely essential. The fact that it’s the first World Cup on African soil is incredibly important. It is a
8 | THE TABLET | 22 May 2010 ahrenheit 2010 – a documentary
exposing the real cost to South Africa of staging the World Cup this year – didn’t quite have the polished humour
One of Kirabo’s acrylic paintings celebrating the World Cup
defecate at the top of the township everyone gets to experience the stench as it runs down the mountain side. This in reality is the only trickle-down effect in Imizamo Yethu.
Despite this, the township’s resi- dents show amazing enterprise. Recycled teabags are turned into greet- ings cards, decorations, mats and bags. Art of all kinds abounds, and earns the residents much-needed income to
chance, as Archbishop Emeritus Desmond Tutu has rightly acknowledged, for black Africans “to show themselves that they can organise something as well as the West”. But the truth is that, as the Fifa – the
International Federation of Association Football – show rolls into town in the middle of next month, it’s white, Western priorities that are holding sway for the four weeks of the tournament. Local sellers, for instance, are banned from doing business within two miles of each stadium. Fifa gains more than £2 billion in television and marketing rights from the World Cup. Not one penny of this goes to South Africans. Yet the expectation of grassroots economic
impact is enormous. When I spoke to Lovers Magwala and Eric Sipho Scott – tour guides in the township that abuts the plush Hout Bay area of Cape Town – they both expressed hopes for “more tourists and increased trade, which will build us more houses”. The Imizamo Yethu – “our struggle” in English – township is surely a test case for those who hold that the “trickle-down” impact of 2010 will reach the poorest of the poor. Nestling on the side of Table Mountain, it received its first low-cost government housing last year, a full 15 years after the first demo- cratically elected government took office. An Irish philanthropist beat them to it by
some five years, building 500 homes when he saw the reality of shacks where more than 1,500 people were sharing one water tap, and where the drainage system means that if you
provide services that should long ago have been sorted. But here, where self-help and real African pride burgeons, the negative ten- tacles of Fifa are actually at their worst. I met an economic migrant artist from another African nation – let’s call him Kirabo, which means “gift from God” – with his foot- ball-mad nine-year-old son in tow. I was attracted to his vibrant acrylics in which he displays Cape Town’s iconic Table Mountain as the backdrop to the newly rebuilt Greenpoint stadium, to be used for one of the World Cup’s semi-finals. As I was looking at all the billboards he had painted, I guess he thought that I saw some of them as imper- fections on an otherwise dynamic canvas. “Some guys came and saw my work,” he
interjected, “Guys to do with the World Cup. They said, ‘Man, you can’t put “2010 Fifa World Cup South Africa” on your paintings without adding the superscript “TM”.’” He decided to put “World Cup Africa” instead but was clearly worried that by telling me his story he would “get into trouble”, as he put it. There we were, he a black African and me a white European, playing out the old sub- servient games that 2010, so many have assured, would help black Africa to transcend. It’s almost as if one can never get beyond them in a world where (mostly white) Western money holds such global sway. But if 2010 isn’t likely to do much to address this, the empowerment that more enlightened agencies are enabling some of the poorest South Africans to experience is not hard to discover.
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