Can South Africa Overcome the Challenges of bad publicity?

As the world converges in South Africa in a couple of weeks for the world's most popular sports—soccer—tongues are wagging in soccer circles whether South Africa will rise up to the occasion to deliver an incident-free tournament or not.

Located at the Southern tip of the African continent, South Africa contrasts with the rest of the continent in countless ways. Geographically, while the rest of the continent enjoys a tropical weather with dry and wet seasons alternating throughout the year, South Africa experiences the typical four-seasonal weather associated with countries of the northern hemisphere—summer, autumn/fall, winter, and spring. The only variations between her and a typical country in the northern hemisphere might be its mild winters and the timing of the seasons. While countries like the United States and Canada are currently in their last days of spring, South Africa is in its last days of autumn/fall, which will soon give way to the winter by the time the tournament is in full swing.

This might sound repelling for first time visitors from the northern hemisphere considering the severity of winters in the global north. But to allay the fears of those from the northern hemisphere, winters in South Africa might well pass as the spring weather in some of the countries of the north. It is not as severe as the gift-bearing Santa-associated “bleak midwinter.”

Infrastructure-wise, Johannesburg, Cape Town, Port Elizabeth and Pretoria holds much more in common with Paris, London, Amsterdam or any ultra-modern city in the Western hemisphere than with the rest of the continent. Internet access, road infrastructure, hotel facilities, and stadia are all well above what is expected in most Sub-Saharan African countries with regard to access and quality. South African can compete with most western countries favorably on the aforementioned fronts—South Africa is a first world with a third world blemish or, perhaps, a third world with a first world innocence.

This makes the choice of the biggest economy on the African continent for the 2010 World Cup an ideal choice.

As testament to its capability to rise to the occasion of the 2010 World Cup, allusion can be made to the 1995 Rugby World Cup that was hosted and won by South Africa. Interestingly, it was the first time in the history of Rugby that every match was held in one country. The lesson is that South Africa did not only pass the litmus test, it demonstrated a capacity par excellence.

Those were the days following the abolishing of apartheid, when South Africans were basking in their newfound freedom under the able leadership of Nelson Mandela, a unifying political figure.

But the violence that characterized apartheid must have only abated for a while.

Today, Johannesburg, South Africa's commercial capital, is touted as the murder capital of the world for some of the notorious crimes in that city. New York, Detroit, Memphis, and Los Angeles, American cities reputed for violence and unbridled gun use, are only a pale shadow of the violence in the townships in South Africa.

Critics see the astronomical levels of murder in the rainbow country as a damper on its ability to successfully host an incident-free competition. In January, 2010, Protektorvest, a company that manufactures stab vest, gave South Africa a bad publicity by introducing a stab vest with country color decorations for fans who intend to visit South Africa during the tournaments. There is no doubt this unneeded publicity might deter some football fans from venturing into a turf with a bad reputation for gun and knife crimes.

The recent murder of Eugene Terreblanche, a white supremacist, raises the stakes even higher for race-related violence, as the group the murdered racist led continues to threaten mayhem during the tournament.

As if all these were not enough bad publicity, South Africa's police commissioner recently said, that his job will be made easier if the United States is knocked out of the World Cup in the first round, obviating the need for massive security arrangements for a visit by President Barack Obama. Instead of assuring a skeptical public of maximum protection in the face of all the bad publicity, he has rather made a case for critics and skeptics.

What the Police Commission failed to grasp is the fact that the visit of Barrack Obama is rather a great business opportunity to market South Africa and not a security threat as he imputed. Indeed, Ghana, a less developed country as compared to South Africa, has already proved to the world that those security challenges could be met, as she played host to Obama's first visit to Sub-Saharan Africa after he became the president of the United States.

The bald truth is that as the world turns its attention on South Africa from June 11, through July 11, the whole continent is on trial. The outcome of events in South Africa, despites its great variations with the rest of the continent, will go a long way to undo some of the negative stereotypical images the mention of Africa conjures on the minds of those who only know the continent through the mediated lenses of the media. If things go wrong, the backlash certainly will reinforce those negative stereotypes. Go, South Africa, go! And make the continent proud.

Prosper Yao Tsikata
Center for International Studies & E.W. Scripps College of Journalism, Ohio University,

Athens, Ohio