Some have been glued to TV screens watching President Cyril Ramaphosa’s Phala Phala drama play out; others have been glued to the football. And as the Fifa World Cup goes into its quarter-final stages this weekend it is worth reflecting on our own 2010 World Cup and its lessons.
Qatar’s hosting of the tournament has been hugely controversial, for human rights and labour reasons as well as because of the taint of corruption and the weird timing. It has also been hugely expensive. By contrast, SA’s successful hosting was in many ways a high point in its post-apartheid record. SA managed the feel-good tournament Qatar has failed to achieve. It did so in the wake of the global financial crisis, helping the economic recovery. And it did so relatively cheaply.
Qatar’s government has spent well over $200bn, which may be more than the total spent on all the football World Cups since the tournament began in 1930. The money has gone on brand new stadiums, most of which it will never use again, as well as on an extensive infrastructure build programme, also including facilities that may never be needed again.
SA spent $3.6bn, on one estimate by a US sports finance consultancy, which ranks SA in sixth place on the World Cup spending list, not too far behind Germany. The real all-in figure may have been closer to $5bn. But where most academic studies have queried whether these mega-events are worth it, particularly for developing countries, SA might better ask the question of whether it spent enough.
The 2010 tournament was a catalyst for the most successful post-apartheid public infrastructure rollout. Given that government has so serially failed to deliver on its infrastructure ambitions over the past decade, it is a pity in a way that it did not take advantage of the World Cup to do a lot more.
Not that it didn’t do quite a bit. Budget documents in February 2010 reported government had spent R33bn on stadiums and other World Cup related infrastructure. In the end, the total was closer to R50bn. Of course, a couple of the stadiums were white elephants, but the stadium spend was less than a quarter of the total. The rest was invested, by national and local government, mainly in improving transport and communications infrastructure.
There were big projects such as the Gautrain and Gauteng Freeway Improvement Project, which were on the go anyway but were pitched and completed as part of the World Cup bid. There were also rapid bus transport systems in the big metros along with upgrades to national and local roads – and an upgrade to SA’s digital infrastructure that enabled Fifa 2010 to be the first to be broadcast in high definition.
In contrast to present times, when investment overall is at hardly more than 14% of GDP and public investment is particularly low, those were years in which the investment ratio was over 20% and much of it was by government or public entities. Much of that was on electricity, with Eskom’s Medupi power station at peak spend, but World Cup related projects featured too. Added to the investment spending were the strong tourism inflows and the consumer spending and confidence that came with the tournament and its fan parks, parties and football paraphernalia (not forgetting Zakumi the mascot).
The Treasury estimated the World Cup added half of a percentage point to economic growth in 2010; a slightly higher estimate came from the World Cup organising committee (which thankfully didn’t call itself anything as frightening as Qatar’s Supreme Committee For Delivery & Legacy). That certainly helped SA’s rebound from the recession caused by the global financial crisis. But a commodities boom helped SA come out of that crisis too, just as it has done post-Covid. China had decoupled from the global financial crisis and its infrastructure build programme sucked in commodities, boosting prices, which peaked in 2011. SA’s economy grew 3% plus in each of 2010 and 2011, after contracting 1.5% in 2009. Then came the end of the World Cup, the commodities downturn and state capture, and the steep decline in SA’s growth trend.
For some in government one of the issues that overshadows the World Cup project’s undoubted success was the collusion for which the construction companies that built the stadiums later paid fines. There were four large domestic construction companies to build five brand new stadiums; one wonders now why regulators didn’t think to mandate them upfront to allocate the market between them in the most efficient way to deliver on SA’s commitments to Fifa, instead of charging them with collusion for this after the fact.
During the Covid pandemic, by contrast, government gave the go-ahead to sectors such as healthcare to collude to manage the crisis. In the event, the stadiums were delivered on time and on budget, though the construction sector has been ravaged since then. Tragically too, so has some of the infrastructure, with much of the train network that carried fans to matches and around the country destroyed.
It’s unlikely SA could host a mega-event now. The co-ordination between security, tourism, municipal, public works, sport and other arms of government is no longer there. Nor is the political coherence. The World Cup build programme was led by a skilled project management unit within the Treasury that worked with national departments, municipalities and the private sector — but with the strong backing of senior politicians who put their minds to ensuring SA delivered on a critical project.
SA showed in 2010 it had the ability to do that. It’s not impossible it could do so again.
• Joffe is editor-at-large.
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