South Africa’s vuvuzelas will be quiet when the football World Cup kicks off in Sao Paulo on Thursday.
Four years after the tournament first came to Africa, many see the global event as a poisoned chalice for its host. Diehard South African fans will no doubt tune in to the games in Brazil, but gone are the flags flying from car windows, the colourful hard hats, and those ubiquitous plastic trumpets.
Apart from nostalgia little is left of the optimism that swept the country, symbolised by a beaming Nelson Mandela taking to Soweto’s Soccer City pitch in a golf cart for the final.
‘It really united a lot of people, and it brought a lot of excitement,’ remembers informatics student Sihle Dube, 20. That intangible unity meant a lot to a nation still grappling with centuries of racial segregation.
But it was short-lived. ‘National unity, national pride that we had in the World Cup and everything else -- I think that probably wore off about three years ago,’ said political analyst Dale McKinley.
‘A few months after the World Cup there might have been that sense, but now the day-to-day realities take over.’ National team Bafana Bafana (The Boys) failed to qualify for Brazil, and the focus has shifted instead to the high costs of hosting the tournament and what South Africa got out of the deal.
The monuments to that memorable event still stand: five new stadiums, renovated airports, better roads, and the continent’s first high-speed rail transport, locally called the Gautrain.
But while South Africans footed the $3.5 billion-bill, most people can’t access the impressive infrastructure and some of the stadiums are little more than white elephants. The vast sums of money would have been better spent on schools or other development projects, said public management student Lerato Nxumalo, 21.