Urban Unrest Convulses South Africa

Does this look like a country ready to host a World Cup?

I would imagine that even the poorest of South Africa's legion of impoverished people are pleased the World Cup is coming to their country in 2010.

But in the meantime, lots of people living in the nation's infamous shantytowns are ticked off by a government that continues to promise much and deliver little.

In this Los Angeles Times story today, it is clear that the issue involves tens of thousands of demonstrators and as many as 20 "townships" -- as the shantytowns are generically known.

Here is another look at what is going on there, a 14-part slide show of photographs of demonstrators. (Note that demonstrators are carrying vuvuzelas in several photos.)

Here is a link to a photo gallery appearing on the (Johannesburg) Sunday Times Web site. The newspaper, which I am coming to believe is the best in South Africa, has coverage of the upheaval, but it isn't particularly well-placed. Which indicates to me that 1) this sort of disorder happens fairly often and, thus, is only second-tier news or 2) they are trying not to make too big an issue out of it, 300-plus days before the World Cup is scheduled to begin.

If that kind of civil disobedience were racking any Western government, we would call them "riots." In Europe, under the parliamentary system, a government might fall over this kind of unrest.

Anyway, the World Cup:

Should the event even be allowed in a country which admits to 23.6 percent unemployment, has an unequally distributed per capita income of $10,000 -- and now has daily riots in the streets that South African experts suggest will only intensify?

Attention, FIFA boss Sepp Blatter: Better have that Plan B for the 2010 World Cup in the top drawer of your desk. And make sure potential organizers in England or Germany or the United States are on "speed-dial."

You gambled on taking the World Cup to Africa ... and at the moment, that gamble seems like a bad one. Read more!

FIFA Signs Off on Controversial Horns for 2010

They are called vuvuzelas, and they are the audio cockroaches of stadium sports.

If you watched any of the Confederations Cup, played in South Africa last month, you couldn't escape them. Unless you had the audio on "mute."

The vuvuzela is a plastic horn that South African soccer fans apparently love. They're cheap (actually, they were given away free during the Confederations Cup), and disposable, and they make quite a racket when someone blows into the mouthpiece.

Get enough of them together, and a whole stadium sounds like it has been infested with hornets. A vuvuzela produces a sort of buzzing drone, rather than some trumpet-like bray.

Some people hate them. European broadcasters and players, in particular ... who said, during the Confederations Cup, that vuvuzelas were a sort of aural pollution that screwed up TV broadcasts and made it hard for players to communicate on the field.

There was hope, in some quarters, that vuvuzelas would be banned at the 2010 World Cup, but FIFA has signed off on vuvuzela sales and usage in stadiums. And that means that endless drone will be the official background "music" to the 2010 World Cup.

I don't have a major problem with this. I can't tell you exactly which American venues use these (or used to), but I am almost certain there are some baseball or football stadiums in this country that have had variations of the same one-note instrument blaring at us.

Eventually, it becomes a sort of white noise ... something you don't really hear unless someone mentions it.

As a FIFA spokesman put it, banning the vuvuzela would be something like banning cowbells at Switzerland games or singing at England games. The vuvuzela is what South Africans do.

The teams that succeed will be those who make a point of not spending any mental energy worrying about this. Read more!

Cruise Ships as Floating Hotels?

Apparently, South Africa organizers are short of the number of hotel rooms the country needs to handle visitors arriving for the World Cup ...

To the tune of 15,000 rooms.

That's quite a shortfall. That's a lot of tourists roaming the streets, or sleeping in train stations, or ending up in third-rate accommodations.

Anyway, the ever-helpful Sepp Blatter, FIFA president, has suggested cruise ships could help solve the problem.

And yes, cruise ships sometimes do help. They were used to augment hotel rooms at Super Bowl XXXIX in Jacksonville, in 2005; and for the Barcelona Olympics, in 1992.

The biggest drawback for South Africa 2010 is that only two of the 10 World Cup venues -- Durban and Port Elizabeth -- have the sort of docking facilities a cruise ship would need to be of any help to tourists.

So, if you want to see a game in Johannesburg, or Rustenburg, Pretoria, Bloemfontain -- and even Cape Town, apparently -- it doesn't do you much good to be docked in Port Elizabeth or Durban, hundreds of miles away from where you need to be.

It would be rather like docking in San Francisco and planning to see a match in Phoenix later in the day. You'd still have lots of logistics ahead of you. Read more!

President Obama and the World Cup

FIFA president Sepp Blatter visited the White House today, and the talk was of World Cups. Both current and future.

(Here is a link to the news story.)

Both the 2010 edition, to which American president Barack Obama has, again, been invited ...

And for the 2018 or 2022 editions, for which Obama did a bit of lobbying for the U.S. as host country.

First, the 2010 WC in South Africa. It is the first World Cup in Africa, and it seems somehow incumbent on the first black U.S. president to make an appearance. We suspect he will, unless some serious international craziness is going down.

Obama's connection to Africa is quite direct. Unlike most African-Americans, whose African heritage includes ancestors who came to the United States, as slaves, 100, 200, even 300 years ago, Obama's father was born in Kenya.

So, yes, he will go to South Africa, if at all possible.

Now, about the 2018 or 2022 World Cup.

2014 is already decided; it is going to Brazil, and South America deserves it. Considering South American sides have won nine of the 18 World Cups played so far, yet haven't hosted one since 1978 (Argentina).

But after that ...

It would make sense for FIFA to bring the event back to the States. The 1994 World Cup was here, and it was an enormous success. It remains the World Cup record-holder for attendance, and by a wide margin, because the U.S. has so many enormous venues. And filled them. Repeatedly. The U.S. also has significant immigrant populations from just about any country you can name, so even if fans don't travel from the other side of the world ... they would have plenty of fans already in the States.

The 1994 World Cup also served as a jumpstart for the American domestic league that has done much to advance the game here.

It's hard to imagine a World Cup here being a bad idea. The infrastructure is pretty much here (though it's hard to travel from one end of the country to the other, unlike a compact Euro country) ... the experience is here ... the communications and technology are here ... and the U.S. remains a quite-not-tapped market. Maybe soccer never catches American football, baseball and basketball as one of the Big Three sports ... but it could get closer, and a World Cup on these shores could go a long way toward making that happen.

We shall see. In theory, it should be time, in 2018, for a return to North America. it will have been 24 years since 1994. But it appears as if FIFA is planning to go back to Europe in 2018, probably to England.

So, 2022. Shall we pencil it into our datebook? Read more!

'Slaughter a Cow for the Workers'

OK, this South Africa World Cup is going to be a bit different.

In this story from The Sunday Times, of Johannesburg, we have the country's president, Jacob Zuma, insisting the country is ready for the 2010 World Cup.

He boasts that many world leaders have congratulated him on just how well things are going. Including Barack Obama.

Even though, clearly, several stadiums are not yet complete. Including the one in Durban that Zuma was visiting.

And, at the end, to give you an idea of the culture gap between South Africa and, say, the First World ... Zuma is paraphrased as asking the mayor of the city of Durban to "slaughter a cow for the workers when they finish building the Moses Mabhida stadium."

Hmm. This is not going to be like any World Cup before it. As if we hadn't already figured that out. Read more!

Upcoming Qualifiers: Marking Your Calendar

We're not far off from another batch of World Cup qualifying matches.

Some dates to circle on your calendar:

Aug. 12, eight matches: Including three in Concacaf, the biggest of which is the United States at Mexico. The U.S. could come very close to clinching a berth in the 2010 World Cup with a victory, but it has never won at Estadio Azteca. Mexico, meanwhile, badly needs a victory over its arch-rival to get moving back into the top three in the Concacaf standings. Also this day, Honduras is home to group leader Costa Rica; the Hondurans pretty much need a victory to nourish hopes of a top-three finish in the group (and a guaranteed spot in South Africa). Also, this day, Germany vs. Azerbaijan in Baku. Germany needs three points against a puny Azeri squad to keep clear of second-place of Russia in Group 4 standings, but winning on the road is always a chore; finishing second in the group means a home-and-home playoff for the World Cup.

Sept. 5, 35 matches: A huge day. Some countries can clinch, many can get close and others will be buried before this day is out. All of South America is playing, as is all of Concacaf's final six, and most of Europe and Africa. Brazil at Argentina is bigger than usual, with Argentina at risk of not qualifying; upstart Gabon is home against Cameroon and can put some distance between itself and its Group A rivals; Mexico at Costa Rica could possibly clinch a World Cup spot for the Ticos; and in Europe, Portugal at Denmark is crucial for both teams, and Greece and Switzerland, as well as Latvia at Israel hold extra meaning. This is the date, too, of the first half of the Saudi Arabia-Bahrain home-and-home for the No. 5 spot in Asia and a playoff with New Zealand for a guaranteed berth. Again, a huge day.

Sept. 6, five matches: The African contenders that didn't play on Sept. 5 are in action. Ghana should pretty much wrap up a berth in a match at home against Sudan; and Nigeria faces a win-or-else match at home against Group D leader Tunisia, which has seven points to Nigeria's 5 with two matches left after this one.

Sept. 8, five matches: South America's 10 contenders go at it again. Argentina at Paraguay is important, as is Chile at Brazil. At the end of the day, only two qualifiers remain for the South American crews.

Sept. 9, 30 matches: More finalists should be determined in another huge day. I'm thinking the U.S. clinches at Trinidad & Tobago, for example. Other big matches: Honduras at Mexico, in a game that may decide the 3-4 spots in Concacaf, 3 being a guaranteed berth, 4 being a playoffs with the No. 5 team out of South America; England home vs. Croatia with a chance to clinch Europe Group 6; Russia at Wales, France at Serbia, with the lead in Group 7 possibly at stake; and Bahrain at Saudi Arabia in the second half of the Asia fifth-place playoffs.

Then we have a month to digest all that before qualifying picks up on Oct. 10. Read more!

Fears of Illegal Immigrant Wave for World Cup

Part of the writing process, on this blog, will be getting familiar with South Africa on a sort of daily basis. And to do that I have begun looking at the Web sites of some of its leading newspapers.

It was from that poking around that I found the item on this blog, below, about the search for World Cup volunteers.

And here is something else that seems to be a big issue. And we can relate to it. Illegal immigration, and South African fears that illegal immigration will rise during the World Cup, as illustrated in this Johannesburg Times news story.

To Americans, South Africa seems a poor and sick country. And, well, it is. South Africa has an annual per capita income of $10,000 -- compared to the U.S. figure of $47,000 (according to the CIA's 2008 statistics). South Africa also has an extremely high rate of HIV and AIDS cases, with one site suggesting as many as one-in-five South African adults has HIV.

But a per capita income of $10,000 is serious money, in Africa; enough to make would-be immigrants ignore those AIDS/HIV statistics.

The only sub-Saharan nations on the African continent with higher per capita incomes than South Africa are tiny, oil-soaked Equatorial Guinea ($31,400), Gabon ($14,400) and Botswana ($13,300).

As the Times story indicates, South Africa already has as many as 5 million illegal immigrants in a population of 47 million, and there has been violence directed at the foreigners by native South Africans who believe the newcomers are taking jobs and depressing the wage scale. (Sound familiar?) Africa is home to 15 of the 16 poorest nations on Earth, and two of them (Zimbabwe and Mozambique) have long borders with South Africa.

South Africa is, apparently, easy to sneak into under any conditions, but it is feared it will be particularly open before and during the World Cup, and that poor/desperate/starving Africans will slip into South Africa, in even greater numbers than usual, looking for work and hoping to take advantage of the economic stimulus of a World Cup.

Which could make for more violence and destabilize the government and the economy.

An event as big as the World Cup ... it highlights deep and complex issues we might not normally consider. And has ramifications we can guess at but not predict with accuracy. Read more!