Warning on World Cup euphoria

2010-02-10 15:57

Cape Town - South Africa's euphoria over the World Cup should not make it lose perspective on the problems it faced beyond 2010, a political analyst said on Wednesday.

Fanie du Toit, executive director of the Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, was speaking at the launch in Cape Town of the institute's 2009 transformation audit.

The audit is meant to measure progress towards a more inclusive economy, which the IJR says is a fundamental building block for reconciliation.

Du Toit said President Jacob Zuma, who delivers his State of the Nation address on Thursday, had a far more difficult task than last year.

Balance

Although economists were proud of how South Africa's small economy had withstood the financial crisis, the "political imperatives" had not gone away and expanding the economy was going to be harder.

"It's going to be interesting to see how he balances idealism and realism now in the run-up to the World Cup; idealistic language, visionary language, unity... on the one hand, and on the other hand saying we are in for tough times," Du Toit said.

"South Africans seem to expect that the World Cup will produce manna [food] from heaven for us, and it seems it's not going to do that."

"It's going to be wonderful in terms of all sorts of [other] things but it's not going to produce a radical financial dividend to the extent that South Africans have anticipated."

"It's a bit of a sobering picture."

Gulf of inequality

Du Toit said the global financial crisis had eroded the resources at South Africa's disposal, and its ability to address the yawning gulf of inequality in society.

"We have less room to manoeuvre," he said.

"Though we've had quite a nice balance sheet for the past ten years, the questions are about how efficiently we've used it."

The biggest wastage seemed to have been in the education field, where South Africa had proportionately the biggest budget allocation of "just about any country in the world".

However, it had not seen a dividend.

"So the question is, how do we use what we've got? And we've got less to use this year."

The institute's programme manager for political analysis Jan Hofmeyr said it would be unwise for Zuma to underplay the structural difficulties and challenges facing South Africa.

Priority number one in addressing these difficulties was human resource development, underperforming primary and secondary education systems and their knock-on effect on tertiary education.

- SAPA