After the 2010 Fifa World Cup high, where did SA go wrong?

It was a chilly winter night in Joburg but the bright light of optimism and hope shone down as South Africa announced itself on the world stage via the thundering boot of Siphiwe Tshabalala.

The opening goal of the first Fifa World Cup played in Africa, scored by an African on home soil… we were united in saying: Our time has come!

Pulling off a successful (best yet at that stage) World Cup tournament, South Africa proved all the “Afro-pessimists” wrong, as SA Football Association chief Danny Jordaan remarked this week.

The 2010 football tournament seems a lifetime ago now, although many are the warm memories of those winter weeks when South Africa was top of the world.

Now, as we enter possibly our worst yet “winter of discontent” – with deaths from Covid-19 rising as fast as the economy is plunging and people spewing racial bile across the spectrum – we wonder: where did we go wrong?

In a nutshell – or in a name: Jacob Zuma.

As he and his cronies began spreading and deepening their network of corruption and patronage, which eventually became known as state capture – money which could have truly given many people the “better life” promised to them by the ANC, was siphoned off.

Hospitals which could have been equipped, weren’t, and houses which could have been built, weren’t.

And as the evidence of the wholesale looting began piling up and Zuma and those around him started preparing their “Stalingrad” defences, they employed the diversionary tactic of fanning race hatred, ironically via white-owned spin doctors Bell Pottinger in London.

Long after Zuma has gone, that will be his legacy. He took the unity bequeathed to the nation by Nelson Mandela and shattered it. We will be picking up the pieces for years.

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