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.
Book details
Image courtesy Cartan Tours
Are false hopes about the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa’s own inconvenient truth? A timely HSRC Press publication, Development and Dreams, asks precisely this question – one that is reinforced by a new World Cup documentary recently in the news. Written and directed by Craig Tanner, Fahrenheit 2010 presents the advent of the world’s largest soccer spectacle in SA in an unflattering light:
South Africa has wasted resources on next year’s soccer World Cup and will be left with stadiums that are no more than white elephants, a critical new documentary says.
Continental economic powerhouse South Africa, the first African nation to stage the sports spectacle, has spent billions of dollars to build new stadiums and refurbish existing venues in 10 cities where games will be played.
But social activists and academics say the funds would have been better spent tackling poverty, housing shortages and a health system buckling under a major HIV/Aids epidemic.
“When you build enormous stadia, you (are) shifting those resources … from building schools or hospitals and then you have these huge structures standing empty and being used to a very limited extent. They become white elephants,” anti-apartheid veteran Dennis Brutus, who was jailed with Nelson Mandela on Robben Island in the 1960s, tells “Fahrenheit 2010″.
“The film does not suggest that South Africa should not be hosting the World Cup. It asks why a third-world country could not have used its existing stadiums – as it did when it staged world cups in rugby and cricket – more in keeping with the country’s actual capacity.”
Issues addressed in Fahrenheit 2010, edited by Michael Cross of local company Rogue Productions,include the stadiums becoming white elephants, Bafana Bafana’s lack of on-field prowess, and the soccer stadium scandal that rocked the Mbombela Municipality in Mpumalanga.
Watch the Fahrenheit 2010 trailer:
Video: Fahrenheit 2010 trailer
For more on this sensitive topic, see Development and Dreams, a book that casts a critical eye on the management, costs and benefits associated with the 2010 World Cup, looking at the event’s uncertain economic and employment benefits, the venue selections, and the investment in infrastructure, tourism and fan parks, among other items. The contributors then explore the less tangible hopes, dreams and aspirations associated with the 2010 World Cup and interrogate what it means to talk about an African Cup, African culture and identity.
Book details
Coming this March from HSRC Press
The Race to Transform: Sport in post-apartheid South Africa takes stock of sport in South Africa, and provides a pioneering exploration of how sport reflects matters such as enduring inequality, racial transformation and the making (or otherwise) of a common South African destiny.
To date, much sports writing has been celebratory, paying attention to ‘big’ moments like the winning of the Rugby World Cups, and hosting the Soccer World Cup in 2010. With the lens focused on national teams, there has been less emphasis on how South Africa’s transition has impacted on township sport. This book provides a view on the relationship between elite and grassroots sport in the context of growing economic disparities and the emergence of an influential black middle and super-rich class.
Divided into chapters delving into a diverse set of sporting codes, The Race to Transform enlivens and transcends the technical debates and contestations around transformation that have become such a prominent part of sports discourse. The contributors, a mix of activist intellectuals and those directly involved in the game, outline an agenda for both theory and practice in the ongoing debate about sport and transformation in South Africa.
Every sports lover who realises the power of politics and economics over his or her beloved game must read this book. Written in a style that is accessible and interesting, it is essential reading also for administrators, social scientists and people with an interest in social change.
Contents:
1. Introduction: Long run to freedom? Sports in post-apartheid South Africa
Ashwin Desai
2. Creepy crawlies, portapools and the dam(n)s of swimming transformation
Ashwin Desai and Ahmed Veriava
3. Inside ‘the house of pain’: A case study of the Jaguars Rugby Club
Ashwin Desai and Zayn Nabbi
4. ‘Transformation’ from above: The upside down state of contemporary South African soccer
Dale T. McKinley
5. Women’s bodies & the world of football in South Africa
Prishani Naidoo and Zanele Muholi
6. Jumping over the hurdles: Political analysis of transformation measures in South African athletics
Justin van der Merwe
7. Beyond the nation? Colour and class in South African cricket
Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed
8. Between black and white: A case study of the KwaZulu-Natal Cricket Union (KZNCU)
Goolam Vahed, Vishnu Padayachee and Ashwin Desai
About the author:
Ashwin Desai holds a Masters degree from Rhodes University and a doctorate from Michigan State University. He is currently a senior researcher at the Centre for Sociological Research at the University of Johannesburg. He was previously a Visiting Research Fellow in the Institute of Social and Economic Research at Rhodes University in Grahamstown, South Africa. One of South Africa’s foremost social commentators, Ashwin’s work is internationally celebrated for its courage and clarity of vision and for its focus on the lived experience of oppression and resistance. His previous books include We are the poors: Community struggles in post-apartheid South Africa and Inside Indian Indenture: A South African story, 1860–1914.
Book details
Image courtesy KZN Literary Tourism
