Voters' turn to crack the whip

The government has shown how much it can do – and how quickly it can do it – when pursuing global prestige

It's odd the way we look forward feverishly to the soccer World Cup as if the occasion were the most important in our history, while simultaneously complaining about Fifa's bullying ways and the amount we've been obliged to spend as a nation on the most prestigious of global sporting events.
Our ambivalence reflects the worry expressed by many international commentators that a country with millions of people in bewildered economic distress is wasting its resources on a frivolity like football mania. After all, the stadiums that were originally supposed to cost under R8-billion have more than doubled in price to set South Africa back nearly R18-billion, which is the equivalent of Johannesburg's annual operational budget for health, housing, emergency services, parks, Pickitup, Joburg Water, community development, plus metro police – everything except electricity. 
And remember that we're talking here only about the cost of the Fifa-prescribed soccer venues, not the further stratospheric expense of new airports and other transport investments. When you consider how many poor people will be subsisting in informal settlements countrywide as the world's most glamorous sporting stars play ball on our soil this winter, it does make you queasy about the extravagance.
Yet there are alternative arguments to the inevitable sense of social betrayal. The completed stadiums, among the most spectacular ever built, will accrue benefits from South Africa's hosting of the 2010 World Cup by boosting its city branding like no other event on the planet can do. Durban, with the fabulous Moses Mabhida stadium and a new airport, for example, hopes to host the Olympics, a bid that will be enhanced immeasurably by the international media's focus on a famous tournament being staged successfully in this country. (Not that the Olympics did Athens much good in retrospect…)
Writing recently on the complex legacy issues surrounding the celebration in Africa of a sporting event that is ten times the size of the Olympics, former UN chief Kofi Annan concentrated not on financial cost but on transformative potential. The World Cup could do more to bring people together than any convention or treaty, he claimed.
"Former president Nelson Mandela understood that, just as the sports boycott in the early 1980s had helped undermine apartheid, sport could also heal its deep scars," Annan said. "I am convinced that this World Cup has similar potential to rebuild fractured relationships within and outside Africa. I am equally convinced that it will do much more to puncture the prejudices that for many unfortunately continue to define the image of the continent."
Among the most controversial aspects of the World Cup's legacy is national identity. When it was held in Germany four years ago, the football fest was said to have helped to conquer the shame lingering from World War 11 by making German nationalism acceptable once more. Seeing a population for so long linked to Nazism proudly waving flags in support of football rather than a savage ideology was as much of a challenge to old European stereotypes as Kofi Annan hopes the local event will be to racism.
On the other hand, incipient xenophobia issues in South Africa have led some observers to caution against exaggerated national identity, goodwill towards competitors being the idealized but not always the practiced watchword in sport.
A positive result of the World Cup being staged here is the trendy proliferation of soccer-playing initiatives in townships and adjacent migrant settlements around the country. With parallel but starkly unequal social realities remaining a divisive South African characteristic generally, projects designed to bridge the gap in a variety of ways have been encouraged by all concerned.
But the greatest single victory arising from the World Cup in South Africa is a vital discovery in the service delivery politics that bedevil our future. The country's new stadiums, airports and public transport developments represent, quite simply, our government's hitherto hidden capacity for action. At a time of accumulating discontent over the ANC's unfulfilled promises, the football festival has shown us what is possible in four-six years of concentrated effort.
Whether Fifa's whip-cracking accounts for the successful local implementation of its formidable hosting requirements, or whether the government has been spurred on by fear of failure in the eyes of a watching universe, we have as a nation witnessed the infrastructural wonders that can be achieved here in a short time. That in itself is cause for celebration.
 "The World Cup pushed South Africa to move more quickly than expected," says Fifa's Jerome Valcke, admitting that this year's event was the first time his organization had had to work daily with the local organizing committee, the government and the host cities.
Whatever subtleties have occurred under the guidance of Valcke, Fifa's motivational skills may prove to have served South Africa well – even if, as many skeptics insist, the world's most expensive marketing campaign will achieve less for post-2010 tourism than for the self-image of South Africans.
Above and beyond legacy intangibles, it is the World Cup delivery model that should be studied carefully by President Zuma's newly formed and multi-talented National Planning Commission in its mandate to design not only a long-term vision of where the country aims to go but a policy framework of how we plan to get there. If confidence and perception fuel success, as they do in most fields - and assuming the 2010 World Cup is the big hit we're expecting sports-wise - the NPC can draw inspiration from the swift infrastructural achievements of a government pursuing global prestige.
Now that we've all discovered just how effectively the state can fulfil undertakings given to the international sporting community, albeit under intense pressure from Fifa, ANC voters should hold their party leaders to account by the standards set in delivering the 2010 World Cup.

Then we might remember the event as a truly important one in our history.