With the news that the Cape Town and Peter Mokaba 2010 stadia “passed their first tests” last week, questions around just how, exactly, these billion-rand-plus behemoths are to improve the lives of South Africans become all the more pressing.
In the following article by Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed on the 2010 FIFA World Cup, the authors take a close look at FIFA’s corporate game, evaluating the benefits – real and chimerical – that football’s biggest event brings to Africa.
The article first appeared in Soccer and Society, Volume 11, Issue 1 & 2 January 2010. Desai is the editor of The Race to Transform: Sport in post-apartheid South Africa, to which Vahed is a contributor.
FIFA has played a heavy hand in deciding on host cities and location of stadiums. The number of cities was reduced from the 13 listed in the Bid to nine, while several stadiums mooted by the LOC were rejected. The Moses Mabhida stadium in Durban will cost an estimated R2.5 billion when the existing rugby stadium across the road could have been upgraded for a fraction of the cost. Bid promoters wanted to refurbish Athlone Stadium, both to reduce cost and because it was located in a historically low income ‘Coloured’ township. A representative was quoted as saying: ‘A billion television viewers don’t want to see shacks and poverty on this scale’. The then ANC-led City and Provincial government capitulated. FIFA’s insistence that the stadium have Table Mountain as its backdrop will come at a cost of at least R2.5 billion.
Ordinary South Africans are being forced to make immediate personal sacrifices. The provincial government of Mpumalanga threatened to reverse a R63 million land claim settlement unless the Matsafeni community surrendered a prime portion of its ancestral land for R1 to build Mpumalanga’s flagship R1 billion stadium. In August 2008, the Pretoria High Court ordered that trustees of the Matsafeni Trust be replaced. Jimmy Mohlala, speaker of the Mpumalanga municipality of Mbombela, was murdered in January 2009, allegedly for exposing these tender irregularities. A report in the Mail and Guardian under the banner headline ‘Pupils burn tyres in protest at World Cup Stadium’ stated that over a thousand pupils demonstrated angrily at the stadium site in Nelspruit when the only two schools in the area were earmarked for demolition to make way for a parking lot.
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Image courtesy Cartan Tours
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