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| July 09, 2006 | Sunday | Jumadi-ul-Sani 12, 1427 |
South Africa plan to silence doubters
JOHANNESBURG, July 8: Unperturbed by doubts over their ability to stage Africa's first football World Cup, confident South African soccer officials said this week they would be up to the task when 2010 comes around.
But certain niggling questions remain over South Africa's ability to host world sport's greatest spectacular — and time is running out to rectify the problems.
A poor public transport system is seen as the country's biggest concern, with worries over whether it will have the capacity to move the hundreds of thousands football fans to descend for the quadrennial event.
South Africa also has a poor record when it came to perceptions around crime and recent reports about a shootout in Johannesburg in which four policemen and a host of robbers were shot dead, did not help.
But a huge plus counting in South Africa's favour is that it has staged both the Rugby World Cup in 1995 and the Cricket World Cup in 2003 without any major incident.
South Africa also played host to the UN's World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 without problems.
Last weekend, a media report in the Afrikaans-language Sunday paper Rapport stated that FIFA was already working secretly on a plan to host the cup in Australia should arrangements go pear-shaped in South Africa.
The claim was shot down by both FIFA's officials including chief Sepp Blatter and South Africa's 2010 organising committee.
The head of FIFA's South Africa office, Australian Michael Palmer, said the world soccer body had very high hopes for Africa's first World Cup.
“From FIFA's point of view, as long as the integrity of the competition is going to be guaranteed, then FIFA will be happy,” Palmer said this week.
“But we have bigger hopes for this — that the 2010 World Cup will change the world's perception of the African continent and provide wonderful opportunities for people in the future.
“The hope is that it will be the sporting event that does the most good for a country and a continent,” said Palmer.
The plan is to upgrade five stadiums and build two new ones for the semi-finals, in the Indian Ocean city of Durban and another in Cape Town.
South Africa is budgeting 5.5 billion rand (US$770 million) for stadiums and a further eight billion rand to upgrade the country's airports and public transport system.—AFP
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