Lungile Madywabe

The multibillion-rand 2010 World Cup stadium construction project, with its time frame of 18 to 34 months, was always going to cause disagreement in the very fragile relationship between politics and common sense. The bill for the stadiums has ballooned from R2-billion to R9-billion before work has even begun.

The South African Football Association has included no measurable performance assessment plan in the lucrative four-year contract signed by Brazilian coach Carlos Alberto Parreira this week. And Safa has no road map or turnaround strategy for the struggling national team in the run-up to hosting the World Cup in 2010.

It was inevitable. Long before the 2006 World Cup final, the Afro-pessimist brigade was already muttering dark warnings about 2010. Now comes the crescendo. We can almost feel the musty colonial breath in our faces, sputtering: "Crime! Disease! Civilisation! Give it to Australia!"

It is the Cup of Dreams — and the Cup of Paradox. As hundreds of millions of people tune in for Friday’s opening of the football World Cup on the immaculate fields of Germany, there will be the temptation, if only for a moment, to forget the other reality: that 99% of soccer is played at amateur level.

When Tokyo Sexwale sits down in the foyer of the Sandton Crowne Plaza hotel in Johannesburg to talk football, he lifts his right foot towards his chest and gesticulates while saying, "<i>Isoccer yimi</i> — I am soccer, <i>ngikhule ngiteka itennis</i> — I used to play with the tennis ball." Black business is taking corporate responsibility on to the soccer field.

At the other end of the spectrum, some African families living in Johannesburg are luring unskilled young black women to work for them, at salaries way below the legal minimum wage. Many are from rural areas, or from Lesotho, Zimbabwe and Mozambique and reside illegally in the South Africa.

A referee fingered by the 1998 Motimele commission of inquiry into allegations of bribery, corruption and match-fixing in soccer continued to officiate for another six years before being arrested three weeks ago during a new crackdown. This has emerged from scrutiny of the Motimele report, which has never been released; a copy is in the possession of the <i>Mail & Guardian</i>.

Referees implicated in soccer’s match-fixing scandal are trying to turn state witness to escape prosecution. And new evidence suggests that the South African Football Association (Safa) did not thoroughly investigate allegations of match-fixing dating back to 1999.