Golden medals have given way to golden goals, as the attention of the international sporting world turns from the Vancouver Olympics to the planet’s premiere football showdown, the FIFA World Cup.
Soccer, as we North Americans call it, has captured the fascination and workplace bandwidth of fans around the globe.
It is THE tournament, on a stage where the spotlight doesn’t get any brighter.
But as tragedies and triumphs of own goals and bend-it-like-Beckham free kicks play out over the coming weeks in South Africa, the host nation hopes its social and economic problems remain in the shadows. A country with a history of racial segregation and anti-apartheid clashes that were a precursor to the end of white entitlement, today South Africa remains besieged by chronic poverty and violence. About a quarter of the population is unemployed and lives on less than $1.25 (US) a day. An estimated 52 people are murdered every day, while as many as 500,000 rapes are committed each year. In 2005, 31 per cent of pregnant women were reported to be infected with the AIDS virus.
And although South Africa may no longer be under white-minority rule, there are complaints of a new kind of oppression: government neglect.
The Wall Street Journal reported that although race remains a source of tension, economic concerns fuel protests.
The $400 million (US) flagship stadium of the World Cup, where the host Bafana Bafana tied Mexico 1-1 in the opening game, is a mere five miles from Elias Motsoaledi Village. Pre-tournament protests in the village of open sewage canals were summed up on a cardboard sign: “We vote 4 basic services not for the World Cup.”
Modern infrastructure, the kind we know and love, is also absent in Soweto in Southern Johannesburg “where roads are dirt, toilets are outdoors and electricity is pilfered from traffic lights.”
“We were victims of apartheid. We are victims of democracy now,” says Ben Tau of the Concerned Residents of Soweto. “It’s only the name that’s changed.”
In today’s South Africa, the segregation is the starkest between the haves and have-nots.
For many, hope of a better life is absent. Scores of street children find escape in the sniff of a glue bottle. In Durban, glue-sniffing children were rounded up by police in the months leading up to the World Cup, a street-cleaning exercise summed up on a sign in the Metro Police station: “beach cleaning operation, vagrants/street kids/beggars/debris.”
And they used force.
Fifteen-year-old Nobuhle Sishi, who left home after being raped as a 13-year-old (only to be raped another five times while living on the street), told the UK Sun that police dragged her and other street kids into a van and “beat us with sticks and sprayed pepper in our faces until our chests felt like they were on fire.”
Life is especially cruel and intolerable for many of South Africa’s youngest. AIDS has orphaned as many as three million children, while an estimated 1,700 go missing each year in a county rife with child trafficking.
This all paints a sordid backdrop for the World Cup festivities, a magical sporting spectacle that takes place in a world in which terrible and good things coexist all the time. A place in which fairness is absent, even when democracy takes hold and segregation ends.
In the spotlight, we find South Africa holding its head high despite the dysfunction that persists within its borders.
The Beautiful Game can’t solve the world’s problems or span the gap between the rich and poor, the latter of which couldn’t afford tickets to the opening ceremony.
“This amount is more than the weekly salary of many workers in this country,” said Oupa Lebogo, secretary general of the Creative Workers Union of South Africa (CWUSA). “It’s an elitist event that is not geared toward the entire population.”
It is a tragedy that life often plays out as an elitist event, with wealth and privilege among the world’s population weighted heavily toward those who live in the Western World in homes stuffed with consumer goods, refrigerators filled with food, and bank accounts topped up with disposable income.
The well-fed fall asleep each night in comfortable beds oblivious to the systemic global problems and gut-wrenching unfairness that are realities of life for some, realities that World Cup contests may help us forget, but which remain when the vuvuzelas have fallen silent.