Robert Kirby: Loose cannon
One of the most revealing moments of the Atlanta Olympic Games was the comment made by a middle-city indigent. With about three weeks to go before the games began, the Atlanta city fathers had suddenly realised that something needed to be done about the stockpile of vagrants, panhandlers and bag- ladies, still morosely pushing their rusty supermarket trolleys around Atlanta’s elegant parks, sleeping out on all the newly painted benches in burnished Olympic malls, shitting all along the marathon route.
With all those inquisitive cameras about to arrive, Atlanta didn’t want to be seen as a haven for the destitute. The Atlanta civic authorities went on a real scavenger hunt. Hundreds of metropolitan nong-nongs, along with their rancid clothing and lice-ridden sleeping arrangements, were flushed out from under all the bridges, from their drunken oblivion around plaza braziers. Battalions of ancient, dried-out whores were prised free of alley doorways they’d occupied for decades. Along with some conspicuously downmarket middle-city dwellings which were hastily demolished, out went the human detritus.
The comment came from one grizzled vagrant. “They say they gonna give us all a free shower and a haircut,” he muttered, as he was hustled into the back of a large yellow municipal truck. He fluttered a stained hand. “But when all them fucking athletes have run over the hill, guess where we’ll be dumped. I’ll tell you. Back in the same shit we always been in.”
Which is not to suggest that any such cynical pauper-concealing would ever take place in Cape Town. Think of all those weeping shacks, all that mud and refuse and hopelessness which, starting at the perimeters of Cape Town airport, runs to the horizon. It will just have to go on rotting. A report last week says there just won’t be enough money to extend the Olympic dream that far beyond the city limits.
And what about our street children? Will they be packed away? It’s one thing to stare fixedly in the opposite direction when you’re at a red traffic light in Cape Town and a skeletal piccanin shakes a tin mug at you. Staring fixedly in the opposite direction when confronted by starving black children is only what all the politicians and their bureaucrats have been doing for years. Why change now?
The apologists are now saying that the real benefit of the Olympic Games will be the prestige they bring to a continent long abused by its colonists. Prestige will not only blind everyone to harsh realities – like street children and shacks and disease – but will help winch Africa into what’s been termed a “magic era of globalisation”.
Apparently prestige goes hand in hand with something called the “African Renaissance”. If ever there was a Utopian misnomer, this is it. Reconstruction would be a far better choice of word to describe what Africa so obviously needs, a domain of practical alternatives. Unless, of course, the idealistic “renaissance” proponents believe, now that foreign aid has all but dried up, all that’s left for Africans is to gaze up at the sky and hope some magic globalisation will drip on to their heads.
Not that Chris Ball is a semanticist. He is a banker. And the one thing bankers have always been very good at is persuading other people to sink themselves into the sort of high-interest debt they’ll spend the rest of their lives desperately trying to repay. In return for a whole shipload of magic global prestige, Ball has not only persuaded South Africa to agree to sign up for loans estimated to be well in excess of R4-billion, he’s hypnotised the entire South African government into pledging its taxpayers as surety for his grotesque Olympic mortgage.
Down payment for South Africa’s R4-billion millstone is R91-million, of which Ball’s own commission is a modest 10%. How’s that for shaking your mug in the rain?
Chris he sikelel’ iAfrika.