A row is brewing over the use of the ”old” city names of Pretoria and Port Elizabeth by the 2010 World Cup organisers, the Herald Online reported on Wednesday.
It said the metro bosses of Tshwane and Nelson Mandela Bay were strongly opposed to this approach.
This emerged on Tuesday when Nelson Mandela Bay municipal manager Graham Richards gave his regular 2010 Soccer World Cup update to a full council meeting.
He said local organising committee chief executive Danny Jordaan was of the opinion that host cities had used their original names in the bid-book process.
Fifa had, therefore, allocated the World Cup to those city names, and those names would be used in official Fifa 2010 cup documentation.
Nelson Mandela Bay is the metropolitan area encompassing Port Elizabeth, Uitenhage and Despatch.
In the same way, Tshwane refers to a metro of which Pretoria forms only a part.
Richards said during a recent host-cities meeting in Polokwane that he had consistently corrected written documents and people who kept on using Port Elizabeth.
”This eventually evoked a discussion and debate around the question of city names,” he said.
Tshwane was also caught in a similar dilemma, which would be referred to as Pretoria for World Cup purposes.
After the Nelson Mandela Bay municipality remained adamant that the new name be used, it was agreed that Minister of Provincial and Local Government Sydney Mufamadi take up the matter.
Jordaan argued that it will be difficult for foreign tourists to identify with the new names as they do not appear on international documents and maps.
After a meeting with Mufamadi, the local organising committee came up with what it termed a ”compromising position” to include Nelson Mandela Bay in parenthesis below the City of Port Elizabeth.
Richards said both Nelson Mandela Bay and the City of Tshwane ”vehemently” opposed this position.
They argued that ”our brand had already been established and we could not lose the opportunity of the World Cup to internationalise the established brand”. — Sapa