• Home
• News
• Urban Development Zone
• About CIDs
• Inner City CIDs
  • Central Improvement District
  • South Western Improvement Dist.
  • Retail Improvement District
  • Newtown Management District
  • Main Street Mall
• Inner City Map
• Links
• Inner City Charter
• About the JICBC
• Contact

Who was the World Cup really for?

Amongst such benefits are: the promotion of economic growth; the stimulation of urban re-development; the intensification of job creation and infrastructural development; the spreading of confidence and prosperity; the engendering of ‘nation-building’; and, yes, enhanced peace and security for both country and continent. If only, like children lapping up a fairy tale, we believe all of this then the ultimate promise will be fulfilled - a permanent ‘developmental legacy’.

The overwhelming majority of the economic benefits that have accrued from this sporting mega-event have gone to an elite grouping of private entities, while most spending has come from the public purse.
Private South African construction companies have made billions and are laughing all the way to the bank. WHBO has increased its profit before tax by 142%, Murray and Roberts by 99% and Group Five by 79%. Meanwhile, the thousands of casually employed construction workers on the various stadia (now mostly out of jobs) never received more than R3000 per month.

World Cup expenditure displaces investment in projects with more meaningful and long-term benefits such as health and education. For example, World Cup-related infrastructure expenditure equals ten years of housing investment. Only 7% of SA’s schools have functioning libraries. Yet for every seven seats in the new stadia a fully equipped school library could have been built.

As for FIFA and its local organising committee sidekick, they stand to make massive profits that are now, according to FIFA itself, estimated to be in the region of R20-R25 billion, the most ever for any World Cup. No prizes then for guessing who’s pocketing the booty and who’s paying the bill.
The costs of the 2010 World cup stadia and related infrastructure, borne by the South African taxpayer, have increased from an initial amount of R2.3 billion in 2004 to a whopping R17.4 billion presently, representing a 757% increase. It is no secret that most of the newly built stadia will struggle to remain commercially viable after the Cup is over – a ‘white elephant’ legacy in this regard seems all but guaranteed.

While the initial bid document estimated that over 500,000 annual jobs would be created through, and as a result of, the World Cup, South Africa has actually lost over 1 million jobs in the past two years. At most, 50 000 jobs were created by the World Cup.
Add a ‘debt legacy’ to the outcome equation. The much touted, ‘trickle down benefits’ to both ordinary South Africans (as well as the region/continent) have simply not materialised.

Besides the massive let-down for small businesses in the accommodation/tourism sector as a result of hugely inflated predictions of foreign visitors, informal traders largely lost out due to FIFA declared restricted/ controlled zones around all the key World Cup sites.
In Joburg, tourists largely kept to sanitized, safe spaces like Melrose Arch and Sandton, leaving restaurants and clubs in the Joburg CBD in the lurch, many of which were relying on increased numbers of visitors to their establishments during the World Cup.

Additionally, the enforced ‘cleaning up’ of urban areas mainly targeted the homeless and poor, something which is in direct contradiction to the promise of more inclusive urban planning, housing provision and living space. This criminalising and crowding out of the urban poor has only served to reinforce and exacerbate the divided racial and spatial landscape of South Africa.
Across South Africa, city authorities conducted so called “clean-up” efforts ahead of the Soccer World Cup. In the City of Johannesburg this entailed removing 15 000 homeless people from the streets into temporary shelters out of town.
Street traders have always been harassed through brutal evictions and confiscation of goods, but across the host cities, the authorities stepped up the attacks markedly before the world cup. Vendors at Johannesburg’s Park Station were brutally evicted on Human Rights Day. Street traders are overwhelmingly black African women who support many dependants with their earnings.

Meanwhile, FIFA, alongside its hand-picked local and foreign corporate World Cup ‘sponsors’ have made a killing, protected as they are from any meaningful competition through government guarantees, monopoly concessions and manipulated ‘intellectual property rights’.
Those who wanted to blow the whistle and/or publicly demonstrate their dissatisfaction were threatened with law suits, effective bans on gatherings and labelled as ‘unpatriotic’ spoilers or anti-social troublemakers.

The bottom line, regardless of the wonderful soccer that was be seen on the field and enjoyed by most, is that the 2010 FIFA World Soccer Cup represents the conquest of South Africa by an elite-led, capitalist branding/image making exercise. In the World Cup business model, elite and corporate interests are conveniently conflated with the ‘common’ and ‘national’ interest.
The grand spectacle is not a metaphor of the historical triumph over adversity, of South Africa’s (or Africa’s) ‘renaissance’ or of a positive ‘developmental legacy’. It is rather a hugely costly and ultimately ephemeral exercise in myth-making. Reality is a different story.

Mphutlane wa Bafelo comments:
We have to use moments like the World Soccer Cup and events such as the World Cup of Cultures not only to point out the glaring inequalities and injustices in society even within the World Cup itself such as the ruthless eviction and forceful removal of hawkers, displaced children, the homeless and refugees, the assault on our environment through the emission of huge footprints of carbon dioxide, and the marginalization of local business and the informal sector by big capital and FIFA in collusion with the bigwigs of local football and the local political elites.

We also must and should use these events to highlight the ample and abundant possibilities and potentialities for the creation of an anti-racist, non-racial, participatory democratic and truly egalitarian, humane and peaceful society where colour, gender and social standing does not define the worth of an individual in society.

Cross-cultural, transnational and international sporting and cultural events are useful in promoting greater understanding that though there is always more than one conceptual and practical frame of reference, there are always sufficient common experiences, fears and dreams to build a universal culture of unity-in-diversity grounded on shared notions of peace and justice.

The more people interact, share stories and histories and are exposed to the human side of each others’ histories, it is the more they learn points of commonality and how much they can learn and benefit from each others’ stories, histories and from the manner in which they read and interpolate these histories and reconstruct these experiences.

Sandile Memela writes, in a letter to The Star:
We come from a conflicted past and the World Cup is helping us take a giant leap into the non-racial, non-sexist, democratic and just society that so much was sacrificed for.
It brings into our lives a once-in-a-lifetime experience which highlights man’s potential to live as one family under African skies. Here is a great historical moment where South Africa truly belongs to all who, at this moment, live and play in it, black and white.

It should not matter that Blatter and his cohorts will go laughing all the way to their Swiss banks after allegedly robbing us in broad daylight. The African World Cup runneth over with success that has changed forever the global perception of what the continent is capable of. It epitomizes everything that Africans need to learn, not only to compete internationally but to get what they want for themselves.