The exit of Bafana Bafana from the World Cup, following its defeat by Uruguay and it failure to defeat France by three goals, provides observers with an opportunity to assess the costs and benefits to South Africa of the privilege of hosting the world's biggest sporting event.
President Jacob Zuma is buoyant: he predicts that the World Cup will serve as a catalyst to economic growth, thereby generating new employment opportunities and reducing the high unemployment rate of between 25 percent and 35 percent of the working age population, depending on whether the strict or the expanded definition of unemployment is used.
Zuma notes further that the construction of new stadiums for the soccer tournament resulted in the employment of an additional 66 000 workers and the injection into the economy of nearly R8-billion, with R2.2-billion of that flowing into low-income households.
While the completion of projects to build the required extra stadiums will almost certainly lead to the retrenchment of most, if not all, of the 66 000 workers, Zuma emphasises that the 40 000 police officers who were recruited to strengthen the police service during the World Cup will be retained and integrated into the police service permanently, to the benefit of all South Africans.
There have been several estimates of the total cost to South African taxpayers of hosting the World Cup. City Press quotes Udesh Pillay, of the Human Science Research Council, as calculating it at 6.6 percent of South Africa's gross domestic product. Bearing in mind that South Africa's GDP in 2008 was R1,271.7-billion, most ordinary citizens would consider that to be an astronomically large amount.
A respected economist reckons that the cost of hosting the 2010 World Cup to be in the order of R45-billion, inclusive of the huge sums of money spent of extending or improving the infrastructure, including stadiums, roads and airports and the rapid bus transport system.
Whether South Africa's poorer citizens would have approved of the expenditure of billions of rands on the World Cup is debateable, given the exorbitant price of the tickets to the World Cup matches and the scarcity of television sets in many of the rural areas of South Africa. If they had been given the choice between spending billions of rand on hosting the World Cup or building houses for the poor, the probability is that they would have opted for houses instead of the modern equivalent of gladiatorial combat.
Tony Twine, of Econometrix, identifies another benefit which he has little hesitation of endorsing. It is the world wide exposure that South Africa has received - and has yet to receive - across the globe via telecasts and radio commentaries. He talks of daily audience of 400-million people across the globe, observing that to attain that degree of exposure over a month, South Africa would have had to pay more than $45-billion.
Another benefit that accrued to South African from its role in hosting the World Cup is the manner in which South Africans of all races, ethnicities and religions rallied behind Bafana Bafana. It has undoubted contributed to the process of nation-building in South Africa, a process that is an important solvent of historically-induced hatreds, fears and suspicions. As Deputy President Kgalema Motlanthe has observed, the hope is that South Africans will ask themselves, after the last visiting teams leave, what they can do to consolidate and prolong the feeling of common patriotism that they experienced during the tournament.
But those who are inspired by the common patriotism that emerged during the World Cup, and in the build up to it, need to be warned that in a heterogeneous society like South Africa, feelings of commonality are often transient and fragile. They would do well to heed the words of the French sociologist Jean Jaureis: "The greatness of today is built on the efforts of past centuries. A nation is not contained in a day nor in an epoch, but in the succession of all days, all periods, all her twilights and all her dawns."
Helen Zille, the leader of the Democratic Alliance, offers a similar assessment when she refers to the task facing South Africa if it is to build a world class national soccer team in time for the next World Cup or, for that matter, the one after that. The process is necessarily a long one, she advises, one that should begin at entry level to primary school and continue for the next 15 years. It should, moreover, be inclusive rather than exclusive: no one should be excluded because of race, ethnicity or religion, she adds.
What is required is equality of opportunity shorn of any attempt to pre-determine the outcome by fixing minimum or maximum racial quotas and imposing them in the name transformation. If transformation is used to limit the number of whites or maximise the number of blacks, it is likely to be resented and to be counter-productive.
Transformation in South Africa is complicated by income inequality between black and white citizens, though the income inequality between whites and blacks is narrowing as more and more black people break through the class barrier to assume their places next to the majority of whites as members of the bourgeoisie. While income inequality between blacks and whites is gradually lessening, inequality within the black community is increasing rapidly, mainly due to the emergence of an immensely rich black elite. Many of these newly rich blacks have used their African National Congress connectivity to benefit handsomely from the ANC's policy of black empowerment.
The emergence of the new class of black capitalist - or crony capitalists - will complicate the task of forging a common patriotism in South Africa. The increasingly tense relationship the nationalists or capitalists in the ANC and the ANC's alliance partners, the Congress of South African Trade Unions and the South African Communist Party, has its roots in the perceived "greed" of the black elite and the alleged attempt of doctrinaire leftists in Cosatu and the SACP to "hijack" the ANC and use it to promote a socialist agenda. If it leads to all out political war, it will undoubtedly delay the emergence of a common patriotism by diverting the antagonist from the task of promoting a common patriotism.
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