Mandela out to boost 2010 bid
2004-05-05 14:38
Port of Spain - From prisoner to president, former South African President Nelson Mandela is taking on another challenge by flying to the Caribbean to secure a bid on the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
Thursday's visit from Mandela and Archbishop Desmond Tutu has prompted a jealous tug-of-war between government leaders and soccer officials who have been jockeying for time since the trip was announced.
Mandela is scheduled to visit a home for children living with HIV/Aids in Trinidad on Thursday and meet with government leaders before talking with soccer officials in Grenada on Saturday and Sunday.
The seasoned statesman who put South Africa back in the sports spotlight after it was excluded from international sporting events during apartheid, is lobbying leaders in the Confederation of North, Central America and Caribbean Association Football for South Africa's bid to host the 2010 Soccer World Cup.
Fifa has reserved the 2010 World Cup for an African country. The continent, which has never hosted the event, was angered when Germany beat South Africa for the 2006 tournament by one vote after a last-minute abstention by New Zealand's delegate, Charles Dempsey.
The four other bidding nations are Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia and Libya.
After some wrangling between the government and Concacaf officials, it was agreed that it would be Prime Minister Patrick Manning, and not the President of Concacaf and Fifa vice-president Jack Warner, to greet Mandela and Tutu when their plane lands on Thursday.
Another compromise was shifting Friday's lunch from the Trinidad Country Club to the Trinidad Hilton. The Country Club was a club that catered to expatriates and whites before Trinidad's independence in 1962.
A local black activist group, the Emancipation Support Committee, said that inviting Mandela to a place that refused to host two black American visitors in 1970 would be "immoral," said Khafra Kambon, a spokesperson.
Mandela, however, will not address Parliament. Under Trinidadian tradition, only heads of state and government may address Parliament.
"He's a living legend," Manning said. "What President Mandela has been able to do and how he has responded to the pressures... without any bitterness to anyone, is a lesson for all."
Archbishop Tutu will deliver a sermon on Friday in the Holy Trinity Cathedral, the headquarters of the Anglican Church in Trinidad.
Tutu visited the two-island nation in the 1980s at the invitation of the government to speak at an anti-apartheid rally.
The retired Anglican archbishop presided over a landmark Truth and Reconciliation Commission aimed at healing the wounds of South Africa's violent past. He also won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1984 when Mandela was still in Robben Island, a prison where he damaged the tear ducts in his eyes in the years that he was forced to crush limestone rocks.
It is Mandela's first visit to Trinidad. - Sapa-AP
- SAPA