So, what about the improvements that were left behind?
Most stadiums sit in the country like white elephants creating costs instead of gains.
Circling Back to Infrastructural Improvements
Although South Africa’s rapid metro system, Gautrain, was started before the World Cup announcement, construction was ramped up for the game’s expected fans and tourists. Now, it is expensive to use and runs outside the area where most of the South African workforce lives.
Some cities can afford this and re-utilize these investments for other purposes. South Africa needed the boost in pride, positive global coverage and presence on the world stage, but financially wasn’t ready.
For almost 50 years, apartheid and racist practices ruled the land. In 2004, when the World Cup named South Africa host, democracy was a new concept.
Former South African President Frederik Willem de Klerk began negotiations to end apartheid in 1990, these negotiations culminated multiracial democratic elections in 1994.
Over ten years later, in preparation for the World Cup games, costs meant cutbacks on much needed capital expenditure. The stadium in impoverished province capital, Nelspruit, costs the equivalent of $185,907,630 (137 million Euro).
“Instead of its despised status as a pariah state, South Africa is hosting 31 soccer teams from around the world, as well as the thousands of fans that have come to cheer them on,” The Star, a South African newspaper wrote in a 2010 editorial. “But post-apartheid South Africa is not a sea of love. It still has serious and potentially even explosive levels of inequality and poverty.”
Five miles from the 2010 host city Pretoria, thousands lived without electricity or running water.
Residents from the Oukasie Informal Settlement in Brits protested against housing in 2010, and squatters rioted repeatedly over lack of proper homes more than 15 years after the start of South African Democracy.
Many South Africans residing in hostels or squatting quarters near the stadiums were relocated prior to the South African World Cup. Blikkiesdorp, a community of iron shacks housed thousands of evicted poor residents.
Fast forward 4 years, the 2014 World Cup is also being blamed for evictions in Brazilian favelas. These poor communities have been in place throughout Brazil’s urban areas for decades and house almost 1.5 million people. As World Cup and Olympic prep ramped up, many of these slums in Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre are in the way of construction. Activists say as many as 250,000 are being threatened with eviction.
Just like Brazil’s Maracana stadium getting a $500 million face-lift, the sculptural “African Calabash” of Soccer City in Johannesburg cost the nation $350 million.
Rhodes University academic, Dr. Richard Pithouse may have said it best in a 2009 web posting in regards to South Africa, “We could have mobilized all the money and political will invested in the World Cup for houses, schools, libraries, parks, crèches, hospitals and sports facilities in every part of every city.”
Much of the financial burden of these games is shifted from FIFA to the host nation, yet the football association receives billions in ticket sales and broadcasting rights. When the games are over, many nations are left to pick up the pieces. Does the temporary glimmer and glory make up for long-term crumbling infrastructure? Is it worth the diversion of funds and energy to the millions of impoverished in need?
