By Christopher Merrett
The 2010 World Cup is a classic example of international capitalism in action. Fifa is one of several branches of the sports department of globalisation, each of which wields the political and economic power of a small nation. It has hired South Africa as a theatre in which to stage a highly lucrative media event and depart with the profit.
The Cup is about a great deal more than sport, the crowds simply part of the backdrop - the cost of their tickets is almost irrelevant. But the political dividends for the ANC are significant and the nation's new elite will be disporting itself in front of the world's cameras.
The rest of the country will be enjoying a long holiday and the brief opportunity to forget the enormous burden of socio-economic problems.
There is no evidence from previous mega-events, or South Africa's current circumstances, that the World Cup will deliver any major benefit. Politicians traditionally lie about the projected economic and social outcomes of such events in order to requisition the resources required for their own political ends.
The best guess is a pitiful 50 000 jobs and growth of 0.94 percent of gross domestic product. The World Cup was never intended for the benefit of local residents.
Taxpayers will pay dearly for this act of national prostitution destined to bequeath a clutch of expensive, white-elephant sports stadiums. Health, education, police and local government infrastructure budgets will continue to suffer.
This is a new form of colonialism - never mind the Chinese, Sepp Blatter's Fifa has got here first with commodified sport on a grand scale. And to keep visitors safe a new form of apartheid will have to be erected to protect them from the violence that prematurely ends the lives of 30 000 South Africans each year.
The ANC has effectively nationalised football and badgered the population with endless propaganda about the World Cup; to such effect that even mild criticism has been suppressed.
The media has bought into the myth of nation-building through sport (the mystique of the 1995 Rugby World Cup victory is constantly invoked) and any dissent from this view is equated with treason.
Contrast the recent uprisings over service delivery in several townships and it is clear which option the government has chosen in response to the politicians' classic dilemma over bread or circuses.
But an imposed national consensus will not outlast 2010. In 2011 the cosy relationship between nationalist politics, corporate wealth and media and sporting globalisation will no longer have even a circus to offer a suffering people.
This scenario should be no surprise to anyone familiar with the history of South African sport in the dying days of apartheid. The South African Council on Sport (Sacos) had operated as the internal wing of the anti-apartheid sports struggle since 1973.
While its roots lay in the principles of the Unity Movement, members came from different political backgrounds and Sacos was determinedly non-aligned. Although its aim was to transcend tendencies in the overall interest of sport, it contained more than a trace of Black Consciousness in its encouragement of self-liberation.
The position of Sacos was uncontested - the ANC gave support to the boycott, but had no detailed policy or consistent engagement. Sacos was particularly concerned about the context in which sport was played - political, social and economic rights - and above all the shared humanity of sportspeople.
For a while sport provided one of few areas of South African life (others were faith-based organisations and the universities) in which the divisive intentions of the apartheid regime could be challenged effectively.
And because apartheid was, strictly speaking, rooted in legislation, short-term irregular use of space proved hard to control even given South Africa's bureaucracy. By the time the government had turned to illegality, sport was the least of its worries.
The weaknesses of Sacos - insufficient penetration of the townships and a tendency to dogmatism - made sport a soft target for the ANC. Its client, the National Congress on Sport (NSC), emerged in early 1988 with a message about a mass-based sports organisation, but pledging recognition of Sacos as the authentic anti-apartheid sports body.
The NSC, it was agreed, would organise the unorganised in areas where Sacos had traditionally been weak such as rural communities and in the townships.
Sacos recognised the NSC but its trust was ruthlessly betrayed.
The NSC reneged on its original undertaking and became a home for two kinds of opportunist: those anxious to establish a future within what they shrewdly assumed would eventually become the new political establishment and pragmatists keen to achieve rapprochement with the old white sports establishment.
Conflict arose over the continued boycott, between regions (Sacos remained relatively strong in the Western Cape) and among sports codes (cricket and road running proved fertile ground for the NSC).
It took Sacos a year, a year that was to prove fatal, to declare the NSC a rival organisation. The NSC was simply part of the cultural desk of the ANC. It had little substance other than the promotion of a particular political party.
Its leading lights included names, then largely unknown, that would later become famous - Gwede Mantashe and Kgalema Motlanthe from the National Union of Mineworkers (affiliated to Cosatu); Valence Watson, Makhenkesi Stofile, Ngconde Balfour and Danny Jordaan from Sacos-affiliated sports codes and Smuts Ngonyama and Jakes Gerwel.
The principles of Sacos were dismissed as unrealistic and hardline.
South African sport was to pay for this - and continues to do so to this day.
The fate of sport since the silencing of Sacos nearly 20 years ago has been one of relentless political and commercial exploitation. Sacos believed that sport belonged first and foremost to communities and their people. Now, in no small measure because of ANC cynicism and opportunism, it is little more than a packaged commodity.
And perhaps the worst aspect of the loss of the Sacos legacy is the fact that its sharp socio-political analysis is no more. Scarcely a word is raised in protest or criticism. The unholy alliance of party political and corporate power has persuaded South Africans that commodification of sport is a natural and acceptable state of affairs.
- Christopher Merrett's latest book is Sport, Space and Segregation (KwaZulu-Natal University Press). This article first appeared in APDUSA Views, and subsequently on Politicsweb.