John Hughes, “Can South Africa keep tapping World Cup spirit? - CSMonitor.com,” August 26, 2010, Link

There is nothing really new in this article, but it strikes me how "easy" solutions might look from the outside.  Our problems will be solved when:

  • crime is controlled
  • upliftment has occurred and poverty has been reduced
  • corruption is lessened

...and in the process we also need to manage:

  • millions of needy people outside South Africa putting strain on our current infrastructure
  • impact of world wide terrorism also impacting us

Now can any person or group supply only 2 serious and workable suggestions on solving just ONE of the items above?   The suggestion must include a thorough thinking pattern on how it will influence the outlying contextual and transactional environments impacting the problem statement.



“After successfully hosting this summer's World Cup, the challenge for South Africa's government is to make a serious dent in urban crime, tackle corruption, lessen poverty, and shape South Africa as a model for a continent wracked by economic and political problems.

 In 2007, the US State Department asked me to go to South Africa to meet with leading newspaper editors. With the 2010 World Cup looming, they wanted to hear the experience of an editor who had managed coverage of a major sports event, as I had in Salt Lake City with the 2002 Winter Olympics.

It helped that I had some knowledge of South Africa. I began my journalistic career in that country. Years later, The Christian Science Monitor based me there for six years as its Africa correspondent.

Remarkable improvements

When I visited in 2007, I found a country drastically changed from the one I had known in the days of racial segregation and apartheid, when a white minority basically suppressed the black majority.

 But it was also a country with dangerous levels of crime, and unfulfilled expectations of millions of blacks still living in shanty towns.

 ... concern that the infrastructure needed to handle hundreds of thousands of World Cup visitors could not be ready by 2010. Airports needed to be remodeled, hotels built, rail lines laid, ambitious stadiums constructed in different cities.

There were questions as to whether huge, crowded multiracial gatherings of blacks and whites could take place without violence. ...

 As we learned in 2010, the fears proved groundless.

 With more than $5 billion spent on preparations, the facilities were more than adequate. Transportation and lodging were abundant. Crime at the various venues was controlled. International TV showed cheering multiracial crowds in fabulous stadiums, against backgrounds of stunning South African scenery. It was a splendid coming-out for the new South Africa.

A model for the continent?

 With the festivities over, the question now is whether the government can make a serious dent in urban crime, tackle corruption, lessen poverty, and shape South Africa as a model for a continent wracked by economic and political problems.

 South Africa’s challenges are compounded by the presence of several million, often-illegal, refugees from elsewhere in Africa, especially Zimbabwe. Though South Africa has its own poor, its economy is the largest in Africa and thus attracts the dispossessed from elsewhere on the continent.

 ... tension and sometimes violence between individual black South Africans and arrivals from other African countries competing for jobs.

 Another potentially worrisome development for South Africa is the intrusion of Al Qaeda-style terrorism, until now confined to the continent’s Muslim north, into black southern Africa, specifically Uganda.”... [64%]