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FORMER SOCCER-FREE ZONE — a weekly sip from the World Cup
– Pieter-Dirk Uys, The Mercury, 12 July 2010
And suddenly it's all over. What now? Business as usual?
I don't think one can roll back the red carpet of success. After a typical burst of South African passion to cancel out the irritating international whinge over crime, corruption and other obvious pimples on the face of our Lady Gogo, this beautiful land will remain as a fridge magnet in the homes of hundreds of thousands of recent visitors. They came with bullet-proof jackets, they saw the truth and they left without a scratch.
So most of us are now bankrupt. What's new? If anyone based their hopes on making a fortune from a FIFA-run soccer tournament, they deserve to be disappointed. The Interim Government of the last few weeks will go back to Zurich with tax-free profits. The democratically-elected rulers will now come back into harness, take the Constitution out of mothballs and rule. Malema back to page one.
Questions will be asked. Freedom of speech is back. We can wear any tee-shirt we like, advertising any product at any event. We can also criticise and demand answers. R125 million spent by government and state on their own entertainment is unacceptable. Let's hope they are forced to pay back out of their own pockets and not ours.
After we accepted that our justice system was suffering from terminal malaise, we saw that a criminal can be arrested on Monday, tried on Tuesday and start serving a sentence on Wednesday. As we cannot roll up freeways and pack away bridges, airports and stadiums, we cannot dismantle this FIFA gift. No more will a citizen be kept in an SA prison for 3 years awaiting trial for stealing a tin of baked beans.
Police are slimmed down and on the beat! Jislaaik! Plastic bags have been picked up and put into bins. Wow! Public transport has emerged for the first time since whites-only buses and trains were liberated by democracy. Skote! A Gautrain can now extend its tentacles across a province and lead a nation on rail by example.
One billion condoms were held in preparation for the expectation of a festival beyond soccer balls. Now we might have enough to go around to solve Friday night in South Africa with adequate protection. And let us not have too many pregnant daughters in 7 months time to blame the state on an ill-planned 5 week school holiday.
The new glittering world-famous stadiums are now more than just arenas for sport. They are works of art and need to be respected as such. If they could be built in less than two years, does a house with a toilet in a black township still need to take six years before completion? And then just dissolve in the first rainstorm?
Yes, we can. Yes, we did. Now we must.
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See related article by John Carlin in Miscellany 2010
