Gustav Thiel
ONE week after staging a mock wedding ceremony with Cape Town’s most notorious gangsters, the city’s Olympic Bid Company is quietly muttering about irreconcilable differences.
The two sides signed their Olympic Peace Initiative late last week, in a carefully managed show – complete with priest – designed to persuade the International Olympic Committee that gangsterism should not stand in the way of Cape Town’s bid for the 2004 games.
Away from international eyes, however, two areas of conflict have already emerged, with company officials privately conceding that the gangsters gained most from the marriage.
Bid officials took to the stage under protest. Chief executive Chris Ball said the show was not the company’s idea – it came instead from the powerful Olympics community forum. The company has also scorned the gangsters’ claims that the initiative has ended all their activities in the Western Cape.
“My friend, it is clear to me that there are no longer any gang activities in the Western Cape and that is all due to this agreement,” says Pastor Albern Martins, a self-appointed “missionary” to the gangsters.
But the bid’s media director, Paul Johnson, says it is obvious that the statement cannot be true.
The bid company’s decision to endorse the initiative followed much hand-wringing. The determining argument seems to have been that the city’s escalating crime problem could be a key barrier to a successful bid.
Ball, nevertheless, balked at the prospect of joining Rashied Staggie, the leader of the Hard Livings gang, and Martins, on stage.
The group which Martins represents, the Community Outreach Forum, draws most of its membership from The Firm, an umbrella organisation for gangs whose main activity is regulating supplies of mandrax, heroin and dagga.
Such activities, police say, continue unabated, although Martins has committed his members to helping the police should the games be staged in the Mother City.
Ball this week refused to comment publicly about such misgivings, instead terming the show a “brave” initiative. “It is not our task to restructure the social fabric of the community, but if the bid can be used as a catalyst to achieve something constructive, then it is to be encouraged,” he said.
Zaliegah Zardad, the bid’s director of community relations, added that she believed it time “to give these people a chance”. Other bid officials, speaking privately, are concerned that the initiative has merely helped the gangsters’ search for respectability.
Martins and Staggie, both now claiming to be reformed, have already announced their plans to contest the 1999 general election through a newly formed party for coloured people, Die Suid-Afrikan.
“I think maybe the Olympic people made a mistake in signing this agreement,” said police spokesman John Sterrenberg.