South Africa: Will the World Cup party be worth the hangover?

By Patrick Bond, Durban

May 15, 2010 – On June 11, South Africans start joling [jol – to have fun, to party] like no time since liberation in April 1994, and of course it is a huge honour for our young democracy to host the most important sporting spectacle short of the Olympics. All the ordinary people who have worked so hard in preparation deserve gratitude and support, especially the construction workers, cleaners, municipal staff, health-care givers and volunteers who will not receive due recognition.

But balancing psychological benefits against vast socioeconomic and political costs is vital, for we will hear plenty about the latter from visitors who will see us at our best and worst. One of the world’s greatest sportswriters, Dave Zirin, called Durban’s new Moses Mabhida Stadium the most breathtaking he’d ever seen, but provided us a needed reality check: “This is a country where staggering wealth and poverty already stand side by side. The World Cup, far from helping this situation, is just putting a magnifying glass on every blemish of this post-apartheid nation.”

In Durban, our worst face is usually to be found at City Hall, where time and time again, municipal manager (de facto executive mayor) Michael Sutcliffe bans community protests against his anti-poor policies, compelling urgent court interdicts to restrain his vicious police.

As a leading journalist (eNews’ Morgan Collins) learned on his way to jail while trying to cover a nurses’ strike six weeks ago, cops stamping on constitutional rights has become a bad habit here. Officials from the national security apparatus told parliament they will go yet further in democracy-removal, throwing a 10-kilometre “cordon” around Mabhida Stadium, named (without irony) after a grand old Communist Party leader.

During June-July, our city’s activists are meant to be shocked and awed by “air sweeps by fighter jets, joint border patrols with neighbouring countries, police escorts for cruise ships and teams of security guards with ‘diplomat’ training”. The aim is to “prevent domestic extremism, strike action and service delivery protests”, the sleepy members of parliament were told.

How ridiculous can the government get? On May 10, trade union allies of the ruling African National Congress (ANC) in the South African Transport and Allied Workers Union had perfectly valid reasons to begin the biggest strike in South African history, as they described it, as do regular service-delivery demonstrators who are victimised by corrupt housing contractors or the victims of shack fires caused by denial of electricity.

To equate non-violent protest with “extremism” is old apartheid paranoia at its worst. According to South Durban Community Environmental Alliance leader Des D’Sa: “On Youth Day, June 16, Durban citizens will test this with a peaceful march to city hall. Sutcliffe’s order to kick fisherfolk off beaches ... with arrests and police violence, is the last straw.”

‘Democracy-free zone'

Much of the blame for Durban’s commercialised democracy-free World Cup zone goes to the International Federation of Football Associations (FIFA), based in Zurich, especially FIFA president Sepp Blatter. To illustrate the stupidity, just a few dozen metres away from where poor people are now denied their source of fish and income, FIFA's expensive imported (German) marquee tents apparently require erection by a German construction company.

Little will trickle down. Aside from extremely loud plastic trumpets (vuvuzelas), the much-vaunted "African" feel to the World Cup will be muted, as women who typically sell "pap" (cornmeal) and vleis (meat) just outside stadiums will be shunted off at least a kilometre away. According to analyst Udesh Pillay of the Human Sciences Research Council, in 2005 one in three South Africans hoped to personally benefit from the World Cup, but this fell to one in five in 2009, and 1 in 100 today.

And FIFA gets sole occupation of Mabhida Stadium, even on the 75 per cent of days that soccer won’t be played, keeping the facility off-limits to visitors. Their anticipated profit from these games: more than $3 billion. 

FIFA sponsorship is hazardous to this economy, as witnessed by ANC member of parliament (and KwaZulu-Natal businessperson) Shiaan-Bin Huang’s import wizardry. Teenage workers at Shanghai Fashion Plastic Products and Gifts have been paid just $3 a day to manufacture Zakumi mascot dolls, which could easily have been produced in our region’s idle factories.

The local World Cup organising chief, Danny Jordaan, predicted in 2005 that 400,000 people would visit. In reality, there will be half as many, and the hospitality industry’s market is glutted after a third of rooms booked by FIFA’s Match agency were cancelled.

Economic farce, politcal tragedy

Benefits are down and costs are soaring. South Africa’s 2003 bid  estimate of between US$150 million and $1.2 billion expenditure rose in October 2006 to a final projected $1.5 billion and now, with insane escalations, $5 billion.

On May 8, at a community class on economic justice we run at our university, a student pointed out that if Greece’s hosting of the 2004 Olympics was partially responsible for the latest episode of world financial crisis and a €500 billion bailout, South Africa – with our untenable $80 billion foreign debt (triple what Nelson Mandela inherited in 1994) – may get the same treatment.

From economic farce we slide into political tragedy. There have been at least two (and potentially more) assassinations of honest politicians who criticised World Cup contracts in Mpumalanga province’s host city, Mbombela (formerly Nelspruit). More than 1000 pupils demonstrated against Mbombela Stadium when schools displaced in the construction process were not rebuilt.

We’ve seen other World Cup-related protests against Johannesburg, Durban and Cape Town municipal officials by informal traders, against Johannesburg officials by Soccer City stadium neighbours in impoverished Riverlea township, against construction companies by workers, and against national bureaucrats by four towns’ activists, who are attempting to relocate provincial borders to shift their municipalities to a wealthier province.

Durban is a special case because of both the grandiose new stadium ($380 million worth, overrun from an original $220 million budget), and the country’s highest-profile chutzpah exuding from the bureaucracy and building contractors.

Sutcliffe has presided over a string of expensive management disasters: failed bus privatisation due to cronyism; denial of Blue Flag status at the city’s otherwise excellent beaches due to high E.coli counts, followed by his angry retreat from the program; his foiled attempt to replace a century-old Indian market (Warwick Junction) with a shopping mall; unending public subsidies for elite-oriented megaprojects; a delusional new trade port nowhere near Africa’s largest harbour; disastrous water/sewerage breakdowns; and an economic development strategy reliant upon sports tourism in a coming era constrained by climate change and fast-rising air travel taxes, to mention just a few foibles.

But worst of all, as Dave Zirin put it, “To see a country already dotted with perfectly usable stadiums spend approximately $3 billion on new facilities is to notice a squandering of resources that is unconscionable.”

The contradictions are evident when comparing Mabhida Stadium – built next to a fine rugby fixture which could have been upgraded quickly and cheaply – to the horrendous shacks in which hundreds of thousands reside within more than a hundred informal settlements across Durban. In April, for example, Cato Crest township residents survived their fourth fire of 2010, with 200 shacks destroyed. Once again, a paraffin [kerosene] stove was to blame, because denial of affordable electricity to poor people is long-standing city policy.

Yet pathologically self-congratulatory officials don’t seem to give a damn. The chair of the municipal housing committee, Nigel Gumede, recently joined Sutcliffe to reject findings of the National Home Builders’ Registration Council. Its bulky report on a city sub-contractor, Zikhulise Cleaning, Maintenance and Transport, criticised a $40 million deal to build 18,000 tiny houses (smaller than apartheid "matchboxes"), which began in December 2006. The report found three quarters were built below municipal building standards and need repairs. Sewerage in the project represented a pollution and health risk, and without stormwater drainage, there is “a high possibility of mudslides”.

Zikhulise owner Shauwn Mpisane reacted: “I stand by what I have always said, and that is that the houses do not have any structural defects.” Shauwn’s husband is S’bu, who notoriously commuted to his police constable job in a Lamborghini after turning state’s evidence in a taxi murder trial in which another policeman was shot dead and S’bu allegedly drove the getaway car. Their extraordinary lifestyle includes a $2 million mansion and $13 million automobile collection. S’bu allegedly intimidated a brave news editor (Philani Makhanya of the Durban Mercury), but his police docket was subsequently stolen, and only just reconstructed a month ago.

The recent defence of the Mpisanes by Sutcliffe must be the lowest level a state official has yet stooped: “The reports that these houses were built to sub-standard levels are absolute nonsense and part of media frenzy.”

Across KwaZulu-Natal province, 49 housing projects like Zikhulise’s contain more than 40,000 defective houses, according to a government forensic investigation. Two years ago, Sutcliffe stated that the housing backlog would be eradicated by 2016, while an ANC campaigning document promised that “ANC members will get houses this year”. Mayor Obed Mlaba justified the vote-catching language: “We are politicians. But when you make promises and don’t keep them, then that is wrong.”

Also wrong is a new municipal policy in which a private debt collection company will enforce $9 million in arrears from 600 council flats. According to a municipal report, council debt collectors have already generated “massive homelessness”, notwithstanding tenants’ attempts to “try their best to pay their levies”.

Global soccer apartheid

So who in Durban represents the core welcoming committee for the World Cup? A city elite overpopulated by venal elites, quite capable of playing the race card (a Sutcliffe speciality, although he is white), enriching themselves and talking left so as to walk right.

Unless something is done, the world-scale embarrassments will pile up faster than goals against the local soccer team, Bafana Bafana, which fell in the global rankings from 81st in early 2010 to 90th today (they are in the World Cup only because they are the host team). No wonder: global soccer apartheid means that the best African players are sucked up into European clubs with little opportunity to prepare for such events.

Asks Trevor Phillips, former director of the South African Premier Soccer League, “What the hell are we going to do with a 70,000-seater football stadium in Durban once the World Cup is over? Durban has two football teams which attract crowds of only a few thousand. It would have been more sensible to have built smaller stadiums nearer the football-loving heartlands and used the surplus funds to have constructed training facilities in the townships.”

The local winners in this World Cup will not be our soccer players nor even rugby teams, which municipal officials fruitlessly hope will one day fill the white-elephant stadiums, but instead, large corporations and politically connected black “tenderpreneurs”.

The tenderpreneurship strategy is profoundly corrupt, according to Moeletsi Mbeki, brother of former South African president Thabo. “It was a matter of co-option, to co-opt the African nationalist leaders by enriching them privately”, he has said.

But because co-option of the politicised grassroots is not easy, once the soccer hype fades and protests become more insistent, local elites will realise their mistake in hosting these games in such a wasteful, arrogant manner.

They will learn what we already know: this scale of profiteering by business and genuine joy associated with the world’s most loved sport are mutually incompatible.

[Patrick Bond directs the University of KwaZulu-Natal Centre for Civil Society, which offers a register of social protests covered in the national media and a new socioeconomic "World Cup Watch" update at http://www.ukzn.ac.za/ccs. This article also appeared as a ZNet commentary. It is posted at Links International Journal of Socialist Renewal with permission.]