With the momentary pause in FIFA’s never-ending football road-show, come the journalistic legacy predictions. And they can only ever be predictions at this stage because we are dealing with such intangibles like the ‘national feel-good’ factor or the ‘nation building bonus’. Will the extravagant new infrastructure ever be fully used again? Probably not. Will the corporate world’s new found love of all things African translate into renewed investment in Africa and a fairer World trade system? Only time will tell, but don’t hold your breath. South Africa has extreme pockets of old colonial wealth and a seemingly intractable morass of colonial legacy problems that no one-off FIFA event can ever hope to touch and it would be totally naive to imagine otherwise.

The 2012 World Cup may, in the future, prove beneficial in some small but significant ways but it will take another decade to try to measure these things if it is possible to measure these things at all. A significantly improved public transport system ought to be of immediate use but as for the sparkling new stadia, they are more likely to be obscenely under-used. The new-found national self belief may kick in for other much needed social developments or it may simple evaporate over the coming weeks and months in the face of such deep-seated black poverty. Increased corporate investment in South Africa may act as an economic spur to the rest of the continent but equally likely is the joyous pan Africanism enjoyed by Ghana’s footballing success will be replaced by the old tribal and national rivalries in the face of intense competition for scarce global resources.

Among the more thoughtful articles is the FT’s ‘Did South Africa Win the World Cup?’ 10/7/10, where five prominent South Africans give their thoughts to Richard Lapper and Simon Kuper. In the preamble to these testimonies, Lapper and Kuper have this to say…

“But is talk of togetherness just propaganda in a country with some very tangible needs? Shouldn’t those billions have been used to train people for jobs, or to provide impoverished schools with libraries, or even just with teachers who actually teach? We wanted South African answers but those were hard to find. This is a particularly unknowable country. In a horrible way, apartheid succeeded. Starting from the absurd premise that ‘races’ are different, the system ended up creating a country where people of different colours often are different from each other.”

Lapper and Kuper continue:

“Most white, black, ‘coloured’ and Indian South Africans still live within their own colour and truth. Driving around Johannesburg, it’s sometimes useful to know that apartheid has been abolished, because otherwise you might not notice it immediately. The northern suburbs remain overwhelmingly white. Alexandra township, five miles away is black. It’s as if Kensington in London and a Lagos shanty town sat side by side, separated only by a highway. There are several different South Africas, and the people in them speak 11 official languages. Many South Africans are precluded by lack of education, or lack of English, from joining in the national debate. Perhaps 40% of black people here still live in poverty, as bad, in many ways, as that which existed under apartheid.”

What has FIFA got to say about all of this?

A second, rather upbeat assessment of the World Cup legacy comes from David Smith writing in The Observer 11/7/10 Under the very hopeful title; ‘Sceptics drowned out by another rainbow miracle’. Smith takes to task people like me who are not only sceptics, but sceptics who refuse to believe in miracles. Smith buys into the idea of a divided post apartheid society coming together under one flag, one national anthem and one dream of a better future. Smith writes,

“History will show that South Africa defied fears of violent chaos to host one of the best attended World Cups ever. It has put Africa on the global sporting map in a way which seemed unthinkable only six months ago when Togo’s footballers were ambushed by machine gun fire before the African Cup of Nations in Angola’. When Armageddon did not happen and smiling crowds flocked to world-class stadiums, it was hailed as a glorious surprise, if not another rainbow nation miracle. But this World Cup was about much more than what didn’t happen. South Africa was an extraordinary friendly and joyful place to be. Thousands of people in a nation defined by race united in national colours in stadiums, fan parks and streets.”

Faced with these two contradictory pictures of South Africa we are tempted to ask: will the real South Africa please stand up. Of course these two contradictory pictures can both be true. The question that remains; which one will eventually become the dominant truth? This dialectical unity of opposites was nicely expressed by Richard Williams writing in The Guardian 13/7/10 under the title, ‘The real legacy’. Contrasting the exclusion of most South Africans from the stadiums with the obvious joy of the tournament on the streets, Williams seems to capture well the duality of what has just occurred in South Africa.

“They (the majority of Soweto youngsters ) could no sooner have acquired a ticket for a World cup match at Soccer City, less than five miles away, than flown to the moon, and they were far away from the soccer academy set up in a more tourist-friendly part of Soweto by a multinational corporation, but their excitement at mere proximity to the event seemed to have a definite value.”

Continuing in the same vein Williams writes,

“Only the blind or blind drunk could have spent some of last month following the tournament at first hand and not recognised that this is still a country in which only half of all black families have flushing lavatories, 43% live on $1.50 a day, education is in chaos, public health is a disaster area, an imminent resurgence of the xenophobic violence seen in 2008 is promised, even middle class homes are surrounded by razor wire and CCTV cameras, and the number of private security guards at work, some 300,000, is double the manpower of the proper police. But to South Africans of all kinds, and to their guests, the tournament really was an occasion for shared enjoyment of a simple pleasure.”

The final and perhaps most telling piece of World Cup journalism that caught my attention came not from the sports pages but rather from The Guardian’s economics editor, Larry Elliott 10/7/10. In this short, seemingly innocuous economics article, Elliott raises all that is desperately wrong with the so called World Cup legacy. Elliott reports,

“Ahead of a special education conference in South Africa to coincide with the World Cup final, Unesco said that a lack of money was hampering attempts to get 32 million children a place in the classroom. Western donors said a decade ago that they would provide the finance to deliver universal primary education, but they have been contributing less than one fifth of the $11bn annual cost of meeting the pledge in the low-income countries of sub-Saharan Africa.”

Elliott continues to spell out the grim reality in the new shadow of the global recession and it is not a pretty picture. To their credit, FIFA are involved in the conference, part of an ongoing campaign by FIFA to get African education pushed up the international agenda. The only real question that remains from FIFA’s 2010 World Cup is whether they, along with the UN will force the Western donors to pay up. AS every day passes, FIFA’s attention, along with the World’s media, will drift away from the African continent and start to focus on Brazil and the pressing problems of the South American sub-continent. Meanwhile, every year, 30 odd million African children will remain locked into the most dispiriting of poverties; that of a life without any formal education. Is this what lies behind the FIFA slogan, ‘The Greatest Show On Earth’?”