Bush spills oil on 2010 World Cup dreams
May 24, 2004
By S'thembiso Sangweni
He who asks from Him shall be rewarded. He is quick to hear but takes time to respond.
Indeed, this rings true for South Africa now that we have been awarded the chance to host the Fifa 2010 World Cup. After seven long years of cajoling and persuading Fifa bigwigs that South Africa deserved to host this prestigious soccer tournament, the SA Football Association bigwigs were rewarded when Fifa supremo Sepp Blatter confirmed that we had won.
It is a dream come true for South Africa and, by extension, for the whole of Africa if you remember that Fifa scorned the idea of African countries co-hosting this event in the way South Korea and Japan did the last soccer World Cup.
But dreams sometimes just remain dreams. And I am fearful that this 2010 dream could remain just that in terms of the envisaged benefits.
My fear is that it becomes difficult to dream peacefully if you have an American-inspired nightmare playing itself out on television screens and in newspaper columns, in what has become known as "the conflict in Iraq".
Iraqi people continue to die and be humiliated in the name of protecting the Green Zone. This conflict - so far away and yet so near - is beginning to have its effects on those who have nothing to do with the American-led war against the people of Iraq.
I find it hard to follow the advice of the headline in a weekly paper: "Don't panic about oil price."
How noble of the headline writer to try to be positive during these trying times of want and uncertainty.
When our own homegrown voice of reason, Nelson Mandela, warned before the invasion of Iraq that US President George W Bush should be reined in because he was "a president who can't think", the world and the UN Security Council - toothless against the White House - looked the other way.
Now the American promise to bring the good life to the Iraqi people has been reduced to car bombs, thick black smoke from oil centres and pictures showing members of American and other allied forces ridiculing and imposing their will on those who see the world differently from them.
The result of all this is the current rise in oil prices, which to my mind will have a direct bearing on our plans for 2010. That date may seem far away but six years is not a long time, when you think that economic recessions and booms have a historical life span of between five and 10 years. Even higher oil prices are a very real possibility in the not-so-distant future.
In our Friday edition, my colleague Audrey d'Angelo sounded the alarm on the effects of rising fuel prices on airline costs. British Airways, SAA and Nationwide have all imposed levies already, and an SAA official has indicated that the levy was not enough to cover the additional costs of fuel since the latest price rise.
Oil prices last week hit their highest level in 21 years as global demand strained supplies.
Does this augur well for our economy and the hopes we have for the 2010 World Cup - the promise of 150 000 jobs, a deluge of foreign tourists and a cash injection of between R13 billion and R30 billion? When the World Cup takes place, the government's deadline to have reduced unemployment by half will be just four years away in 2014.
Bush must be ordered back to base, or else UN secretary-general Kofi Annan will remain just a man who is good at poetic speeches but thin on poetic justice.
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