Will the World Cup change South Africa?

airports. At Soccer City, where the World Cup will start and finish, a bit of landscaping is all that is needed to complete a magnificent setting.

The stadium is achievement enough, but the area around it has been transformed since Bond first visited the site three years ago. New roads and a shiny new station for the Gautrain has also been built, providing firm evidence of the impact this World Cup has already had on the country.

Bond notes that doubts and fears persist over crime and security. About 10% of tickets remain unsold despite the over-the-counter sales of the last few weeks, while resentment persists over FIFA’s heavy-handed marketing police and the botched handling of hotels and hospitality packages that were priced too high by FIFA partners Match.

The stadiums are magnificent, though, the atmosphere and anticipation is building, and the people Bond has met during the past few days could not be more welcoming.

Even in the township of Khayelitsha, a vast sprawl of corrugated iron shacks on the Cape Flats that is home to 1.6 million, the people are warm and friendly.

In Khayelitsha, Bond met Lunga, a young football coach, who works at one of the 20 Football For Hope projects being built across Africa at a cost to FIFA of $70 million. The scheme’s aim is to leave the continent a proper legacy from the World Cup.

Lunga uses football skills to help teach teenagers values that will help them combat the deadly risks from HIV infection, drugs and crime. He does it because football has helped him escape the harsh realities of life in a township.

He has first-hand experience of how harsh that life can be. Earlier this year, two of his uncles were murdered, shot dead outside the tiny house he shares with his grandmother. Surely, Bond asks, the World Cup has played a big part in helping him turn his life around?

Yet even Lunga is not convinced there will be any lasting benefit to the poorest inhabitants of this country. As with most people Bond spoke to in Johannesburg and Cape Town, Lunga thinks that nothing will really change once the tournament is over and the rich will just get richer.

Danny Jordaan, the chief executive of South Africa’s organizing committee and, for more than a decade now, the driving force behind bringing the World Cup here, passionately defends the positive impact of the event.

He insists the World Cup will leave South Africa with more than a few new stadiums and happy memories, citing the new roads, rail and bus networks that have been built, as well as the airport terminals and hotels. Then there is the innovation and development of the nation’s broadcasting and technology infrastructure.

Jordaan says history will come to view the World Cup in the same context as Nelson Mandela’s release from Robben Island and the 1994 democratic elections.

“Perhaps he will be right,” Bond writes. “The danger, however, is that South Africa will have spent billions of dollars on a 30-day advert for the country that quickly fades as the sporting world moves on.”