Winners and losers

RUSSELL SKELTON
June 16, 2010

AT THE Sakafina TV park, soccer fans line up to be searched by police wearing dark blue flak jackets and armed with automatic weapons and mace. Not only are tattered plastic shopping bags checked, but each person, regardless or age or gender, is patted down for knives, guns and makeshift weapons.

From the security checkpoint the eager fans of Diepsloot Township, a jumble of squalid shacks constructed from broken bricks, cardboard, scrap iron and packing cases, pass through steel gates into a vast stretch of green.

They have come to watch the opening rounds of the 2010 World Cup in a park surrounded by a two-metre, razor-tipped steel picket fence. At one end sits a vast plasma screen perched on a stand several metres high. The images projected on the screen are fuzzy and washed out by the setting sun, but nobody seems too worried. These so-called TV parks were set up across South Africa by a local telecom to bring television to poor communities.

Rachael Zulu, a 43 year-old mother of two, is sitting patiently on the grass waiting for the match between South Africa and Mexico to kick off. She says there is no way she could afford to buy a ticket to see the national side ''Bafana, Bafana'' play at any of the new stadiums.

''I don't know of anybody living here who is going to the World Cup; we are all poor,'' she says. ''I am a piece worker, everything I make goes to keeping my girl at school.''

In the background vuvuzelas hum like swarming bees; fans dance in fabulously decorated makarapa work hats and wave wildly whenever a Bafana player appears on the screen, even in the ad breaks. It seems everybody is celebrating victory long before the game begins. When President Jacob Zuma appears on the screen the applause is solid but restrained and a woman standing next to me immediately thinks of Nelson Mandela. ''Madiba promised us he would never die until he held the cup in his hands,'' she says.

Zulu and her family are enjoying the moment. Children around her are waving their South African flags and shouting ''Bafana Bafana''. Then, with remarkable candor, the young mother says she is surprised to be alive to witness the second greatest event in South Africa's history after Mandela's election. Like one in three of her neighbours, she says she is HIV positive, and maintaining a supply of anti-viral medicine is a constant challenge.

Peter Rakoto, who says he drifts in and out of work, tells The Age that World Cup tickets are something he can only dream about. ''I cannot even think about going; we desperately want to. The World Cup is great for this country, for all of us coming together, blacks and whites. It's unifying.'' His friend smiles in agreement.

Fredi Ndou, standing nearby, says the occasion is a powerful historic marker. ''This will leave a good feeling for our kids and their kids to know that South Africa hosted the World Cup, that we competed with the world.''

At the TV park I can spot only three white faces among the thousands present. The international image of South Africa projected around the globe is of vibrantly dressed fans, black, white and coloured (the old apartheid classification was dispensed with in 1994 but is still embedded in the national psyche) filling stunningly designed stadiums and blowing their vuvuzelas and urging on Bafana Bafana.

It all seems a powerful endorsement of Nelson Mandela's visionary rainbow society. But standing in the park, surrounded by a mass of exuberant people in knock off t-shirts, and polyester jackets and jumpers, there is no visible sign of the Mandela's vision. These people live a world away from the big stadium crowds made up of the middle class - black and white.

An overwhelming majority of South Africans are watching the cup from TV parks and small bars because they cannot afford a ticket or a television. Even to own a television set here is to put you and your family at risk of theft or assault.

In Diepsloot life is hard: 50 per cent of people are unemployed, around 30 per cent are HIV positive, and probably double that figure have resistant strains of tuberculosis. Several of the people I talk to say matter-of-factly that they had brothers and sisters who had died from AIDS. They say this not because they are insensitive, it's just the way life is. Despite a big housing program to replace 20,000 two by three metre shacks, many of the 200,000 residents share communal toilets and water taps. Electricity is also a luxury (it costs $10 to buy fuel for a generator), along with street lighting.

To reach Diepsloot, which lies halfway between Johannesburg and Pretoria, the highway passes over a deep river bed, which gives Diepsloot its Afrikaans name, ''deep ditch''. It also passes a string of luxury car dealers displaying the latest Bentleys, BMWs and Lamborghinis and imposing estates protected by electrified fences and private security.

Violence has a way of erupting in unexpected ways in Diepsloot and at the TV park police are taking precautions. ''In these situations things can get out of hand in a few minutes,'' a police officer says. ''All it takes is for Bafana Bafana to get beaten and the mood will change in a flash.''

As the excitement builds with Bafana Bafana missing numerous shots at goal, the officer suggests that it might not be wise to stay too long, advice hard to comprehend, given the infectious excitement. The only event of major concern for police at that point had been the numbers of lost children.

Peter Malopile, a 39 year-old man, also without regular employment, says the Cup has put the nation in a positive mood. ''This is a day much like the day Nelson Mandela became president. Everybody is happy with what SAFA [The South African Football Association] has done; the situation can only get better.''

By that Malopile meant more jobs, more prosperity from a stimulated economy. But that, according to local economic commentators, maybe a faint hope.

South Africa lost 1 million jobs as a result of the Global Financial Crisis and now that work on the stadiums, roads and airports is at an end, it's difficult even for the nation's central bank to see where new jobs will come from.

And that is when frustration and violence can set in. Not far from the TV park mob ''justice'' last year resulted in the bashing to death of a Zimbabwean refugee suspected of stealing. Significant numbers of Diepsloot residents are economic refugees and asylum seekers from Zimbabwe and Mozambique willing to work for less pay.

When ''xenophobia'' was at its height several years back, a much-publicised tactic was to wrap victims in a synthetic blanket and set it alight.

Ethnic violence and shocking homicide rates are only part of the story here. Some 38 per cent of people in Johannesburg, South Africa's wealthiest city, live in poverty according to the government's own figures. In Diepsloot the figure is probably double that, although nobody seems to have reliable figures.

This raises the question that many people think about but don't dare ask for fear of spoiling the party: should South Africa have spent over $44 billion on staging the cup, on building stadiums that will eventually lie idle, or should the money have been committed to education, health and developing new industries?

At Bra Femis Tavern, a short distance from the TV park, men are drinking beer served from behind an iron grill and following Bafana's every move with a forensic eye. They wave and shout at the plasma screen and every so often I am reassured that ''I am winning'', a reference to South Africa's draw with Mexico. One of the few women in the bar tells me that ''white people'' are welcome here.

The mood is up and the bar owner believes that the cup has provided jobs for many of these men. But as genial as the occasions is, it is these men who have missed out on South Africa's new found prosperity, and they remain condemned to life in the ghetto.

Richard Calland, Associate Professor in law at Cape Town University, put it very succinctly in a recent newspaper column : ''Sport can offer both vivid inspiration and all consuming escapism. Thus the cup may serve to remind South Africans of how much has been achieved since the days of the sporting boycott and in so doing engender a national sense of pride and purpose.''

Or he said, it may merely mask the cracks for a short time, obscuring the real fault lines and encourage those who wish to loot the state to continue to do so with dangerous impunity.

For those at the Diepsloot TV park and surrounding bars, there is no question that they have caught World Cup fever, even though they watch the events on blurred screens crammed together in a secure enclosure to protect them from each other. How they will feel when the FIFA circus moves on next month is another matter.

It will be, as Calland noted, a tough time, not just for people whose expectations have been raised, but for the ANC government of President Jacob Zuma, which will come under pressure to close the gap between rich and poor and give meaning to Mandela's rainbow nation before it becomes an empty cliche. Zuma recently wept at the poverty he came across in a small township, but progress will require more than empathy.