One week ago today, Barcelona playmaker Andres Iniesta scored a dramatic extra-time winner to hand Spain a 1-0 victory over the Netherlands in the 2010 World Cup Final – the country’s first ever triumph in the competition. The tournament will mostly be remembered, however, for being the first to be held in Africa, and there was inevitably much hype and much sentimentality about the broader significance of the event to its host country, South Africa.
Which is probably just as well, since the action on the pitch was largely forgettable. For days at a time, the tournament languished in a mire of poor match after poor, goal-deprived match, with the drone of thousands of vuvuzela horns only adding to the difficult spectacle endured by hundreds of millions of fans worldwide.
Controversy surrounding the model of ball used in the tournament, and a series of bizarre episodes – such as the crackdown on a group of innocuous-looking Dutch women in an advertising stunt inexplicably linked to British TV pundit Robbie Earle – only added to the sense of this being the sort of World Cup that the organisers, FIFA, dread.
And to think that it had all looked so promising when Siphiwe Tshabalala spectacularly fired the host nation’s beloved Bafana Bafana* into an early lead in the opening game, staged (like the final) within a stone’s throw of the famous Soweto township in Johannesburg.
But it soon went bad – and then got worse. And I don’t mean when a team won a knock-out match by deliberately breaking one of football’s golden rules; no, I’m talking about when a goal isn’t a goal.
Laughing stock
Football has long been considered by many in the sporting world as somewhat archaic for its refusal to embrace 21st-century technology in order to ensure accurate decisions are made and fair outcomes reached. Never has this refusal turned the sport, at its very highest level and in front of the biggest audience imaginable, into such a laughing stock.
Let us firstly get a few things straight: Germany beat England; Germany deserved to beat England; Germany were always going to beat England (on penalties or otherwise); ultimately, Germany were better than England. Some claimed poetic justice when Frank Lampard’s goal – for that’s what it was – did not count, 44 years after Geoff Hurst’s miss – likewise – did.
However, it beggars belief that the two decisions can even be compared, separated as they are by decades of extraordinary technological advancement and associated global media expansion; imagine telling an Englishman in the 1960s that he could one day join fellow football fans around the world in simultaneous disbelief as they all watched an array of instant action replays beamed from a giant all-seated sports stadium in the land of the Boers.
And the scale of South Africa’s achievement in winning the right to host the world’s biggest single-sport event, and its comprehensive success in keeping the promises it made in doing so, cannot be underestimated. The venues were, by all accounts, magnificent, and the infrastructure – from hotels to transport links – excellent. But there is much more to South Africa than met the world’s eye.
Unemployment
The country may seem to many to be the only one in Africa that is anywhere near capable of hosting and paying for such a show, but South Africa is in fact only the seventh richest country, on a per-head basis, on the continent; and although (impressively) it boasts the world’s 24th-largest economy, it ranks a dire 129th out of 182 nations on the UN’s Human Development Index – 12th in Africa.
The economy, almost stagnant in the last years of apartheid, grew healthily before global recession took hold, and the same progress is expected in the coming years, especially off the back of the World Cup; however, South Africa’s official unemployment rate is 25% – the highest in the world.
Do not imagine either that racial inequality is a thing of the rainbow nation’s past: the proportion of blacks who are unemployed is five times that of whites. And with half of young adults out of work, the prospects are grim, especially as South Africa stands at the bottom of international rankings in maths and science education.
Many aspects of infrastructure are also a cause for concern – healthcare services are crippled by the burden of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, whose death toll numbers three million and which touches the lives of almost all South Africans (here too, cultural factors are evident – 14% of blacks are infected against 1.5% of whites and coloureds). Ironically, another headache for healthcare providers is alcohol abuse – usually a sign of a more affluent society in an economically developed nation.
The country’s roads, meanwhile, are a scene of carnage (as was tragically demonstrated by the death of Nelson Mandela’s great-granddaughter at the hands a drunk driver on the eve of the World Cup). The death rate for road accidents is 33 per 100,000 population – twice the global average.
Vicious circle
Perhaps South Africa’s biggest shame, though, is crime. A global survey rates the country worst out of 133 nations for crime, and in the top ten most murderous in the world; on average, around 50 murders are recorded every day, alongside scores of rapes, armed robberies and violent assaults. A recent poll found that two-thirds of South Africans feel ‘very unsafe’ walking alone in the dark; 1 in 5 had recently experienced crime. And unlike other trends, crime transcends ethnic boundaries.
So with most people still trapped in a vicious circle of poor education, high unemployment, rampant crime and insufficient healthcare, and with inequality stark and still growing, it will take more than a few weeks of football to transform South Africa. To believe anything else would be foolish.
Indeed, the hundreds of millions that were spent on staging such a massive show could and probably should have been targeted at improving the lives of the many thousands who now live in the shadow of those magnificent monuments to the nation’s turn in the global spotlight – a spotlight that, for all the eulogising by officials and journalists alike, did not shine at all on the majority of South Africans.
But FIFA would rather you didn’t know that.
* (A Zulu term of endearment roughly meaning ‘boys boys’)
NB. All of the figures in this post are taken from 'The Price of Freedom: A Special Report on South Africa', The Economist, 5 June 2010. As ever for that publication, the report is an excellent, balanced account of the story behind the headlines - a real eye-opener, and highly recommended.
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