FIFA 2010 Stadium in Cape Town (South Africa).

© Flickr.com/Epic Memory

The country has escaped much of the fall-out of the crisis because of its sound banking system, in which very few toxic assets are on the books. But the global downturn was always going to have an impact on an economy as globalised as South Africa’s. During the last quarter of last year, it contracted for the first time in ten years. This year there has already been a massive drop in manufacturing, making another shrinking quarter likely. But South Africa’s former president Kgalema Motlanthe was upbeat about it all. The reason: a bonanza of global sporting events culminating in the FIFA Football World Cup in less than 18 months’ time. This month the Indian Professional League brought its tournament to South Africa after the Mumbai terror attacks; the British Lions rugby team tour starts in May 2009, followed by FIFA’s Football Confederations Cup in June 2009.

Enormous figures are being bandied about on what these all mean in terms of boosting tourism, the hospitality industry, the media and taxes for the government. Deputy Minister of Sport, Gert Oosthuizen, estimates the direct contribution of the FIFA World Cup alone to GDP R55.7bn** (about US$6bn) with tax of R19.3bn being generated: “The succession of tournaments imposed on us the need to invest in bulk infrastructure and that investment serves as a countercyclical measure against the negative consequences of the global economic meltdown”. Analysts question the figures used by Oosthuizen. Some say it would more likely be about R22bn, with the government recouping a spend of more than R15.6bn by not more than R8bn. This sounds more in tune with the World Cup legacies of other recent hosts, such as South Korea, which is still battling to pay off its World Cup debts. 

Rainbow-nation spirit

Motlanthe is right when it comes to the more intangible factors. For the past year or so, South Africans have been stoically enduring the almost frenzied construction work on new transport systems because they know they will change South Africa forever. Pride of place goes to the ‘Gautrain’, a name encompassing the Sesotho language word for Johannesburg, the country’s commercial capital, as well as the Afrikaans word ‘gou’, which means quick. There is also the illusion to ‘goud’, the metal that gave the 110-year-old city its existence. It is an almost perfect example of Nelson Mandela’s Rainbow-nation spirit, encompassing the old and new orders in reconciliatory projects. But it goes much further than that. Enormously expensive as it is going to be – costs could reach R40bn (US$4.5bn) – it will catapult South Africa into the 21st Century, and strike a blow against one of the most tenacious legacies of the past: apartheid. Under the former National Party, in power from 1948-1994, the country modernised itself in leaps and bounds but the benefits of growth were reserved for years for the white population who enjoyed one of the highest living standards in the world.

One of the more unusual consequences was that South Africa never developed proper public transport systems. While it was among the first countries, in the 19th Century already, to have trams these were eventually phased out. Plans for underground trains never got off the planning board. Instead, huge amounts were spent on building state-of-the-art highways for cars. The apartheid government planned roads which avoided the ever-mushrooming black townships.

It has only been under the stewardship of Finance Minister Trevor Manuel that the government has begun the huge challenge of installing transport systems that cater for all, rich and poor. Such systems have also suddenly, in the past few years, become essential for the country’s battle plan against climate change. Proper public transport became a matter of urgency. Quite soon after the World Cup announcement, construction started on the Gautrain, which will connect Johannesburg with the administrative capital Pretoria, 60km away, snaking through both affluent, now mixed-race suburbs, and the still dirt-poor black townships.

World Cup fever was also used to launch another key system. The Rea Vaya (‘we are going’) Bus Rapid Transit System was touted as essential to ferry fans from especially townships to the various WC venues in the country’s cities. The two projects exposed the dark underbelly of the World Cup spectacle; benefiting a relatively small number of international businessmen. In late March 2009, black minibus taxi drivers launched their first strike against the BRT system. For fifty years they had been supplying the essential links between black workers who could only find work in white areas. In the post-apartheid dispensation they were hailed as entrepreneurs, setting up transport businesses without the help of whites. “We’re going to lose jobs to these buses. We’re not going to allow these buses to happen”, said Alexandra Taxi Association spokesperson, Velile Thambe.

Other questions are being raised: how much of the World Cup proceeds will actually reach the poor? Five brand new stadiums are being built, and the one in Cape Town will cost R3bn (US$350M). “To build the stadium will cost 60,000 homes (for the poor) that about 300,000 people would live in and use every day for decades, and not once for 45 minutes each way”, says Professor Anthony Leiman of Cape Town University. ‘Celebrate Africa’s Humanity’ is the broader theme of the whole 2010 project, but Germany’s enormously successful integration of soccer into the arts and other disciplines in 2006, through its ‘goalposts’ project, seems to remain a foreign concept for Johannesburg. Still, South Africans are hugely upbeat about 2010. In a survey last year improvements in infrastructure were expected by almost nine in 10 (87 per cent). About 88 per cent stated they were proud South Africa was hosting the cup and 83 per cent agreed it would improve South Africa’s image abroad.

* Hans Pienaar is a Johannesburg-based journalist.
** On 28 April 2009, 1 South African Rand = 0.0876 euro.

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