South Africa’s star power restored as World Cup ends

JOHANNESBURG - From “ugly worm” to “beautiful butterfly,” as the country’s Nobel-winning Archbishop Desmond Tutu put it, the remarkable success of the World Cup confirmed the metamorphosis of South Africa from segregated pariah state 20 years ago to acclaimed global power.

On the final day of a World Cup being described as one of the best ever, the realization of what had taken place - and, equally importantly, what had not - was sinking in.

Spurred by critics who had predicted disaster at the first World Cup on a continent characterized by underachievement, Africa’s largest economy had left no stone unturned in trying to prove that “yes, South Africa can.”

The ten stadiums built or upgraded for the World Cup were all completed well ahead of time and to the loftiest standards of technology and design.

“Not one single European country has so many good and high-level stadia that are available here in South Africa,” FIFA president Joseph Blatter praised.

Public transport, too, got a shot in the arm for the tournament.

After some teething problems with choked park-and-ride facilities and clogged roads in the first days, many car-obsessed South Africans ditched their wheels and joined visitors in taking new public buses and trains to the games.

More importantly, around 200,000 foreign football fans flitted around the country for a month after their teams and none had come to serious harm.

In the most serious incidents, a few media teams were robbed at gunpoint, but criminals didn’t really come to the party - dissuaded by the deployment of 44,000 police and the tough justice handed down in special World Cup courts, where stealing a fan’s blanket could land you behind bars.

The foreign journalists who had been prepped for war-like conditions - some British tabloid journalists were even taught to tie tourniquets before travelling to the World Cup - discovered that the biggest threat to their health was the biting cold of the South African winter, not the bite of a bullet.

For the first time in years, the news-makers were “the silent moderate majority, who want this country to succeed, want to take hands,” and not extremists, former president FW de Klerk noted in an interview.

Long after the home side Bafana Bafana, and main African hope “BaGhana BaGhana,” crashed out, they thronged stadiums and fan fests in a massive show of support that made up for disappointing numbers of foreign visitor.

Average attendance at the three-games-to-go mark was 49,134, putting South Africa third behind the 1994 World Cup in the United States and the 2006 edition in Germany, despite a tough global economic climate.

For many South Africans, the World Cup was a chance at the kind of shared experience they had experienced in 1995, when former president Nelson Mandela cajoled blacks into celebrating the national rugby team’s World Cup victory.

While that was a special moment, the football World Cup was “much, much better than that,” according to John Carlin, author of a book on the 1995 rugby tournament, which was made into the 2009 movie Invictus.

“What we saw was just how united and racially healed South Africa really is,” Carlin wrote in South Africa’s Saturday Star newspaper.

“We have had an image makeover for South Africa and the continent of Africa,” the World Cup’s main man, local organizing committee boss Danny Jordaan, said proudly.

South Africa spent nearly 40 billion rand (about 5.2 billion dollars) on hosting the tournament but that kind of rebranding was “priceless,” he said.

The challenge now for South Africa is to maintain that “can do” attitude and apply it to combatting crime and speeding up the rollout of basic services.

Keepflying.co.za website is urging South Africans to keep flying the country’s colours for 30 days after Sunday - literally and figuratively.

According to the website, Toyota, McDonald’s and South Africa’s Absa bank are already on board.