Nigeria's Politically Correct Team In Brazil

In two weeks, on Monday, June 16, Nigeria will play Iran in Brazil world football competition as its first match in the Group F, trying to qualify for the second stage.
Go, Go, Naija!
Now, there is something strange with the team Nigeria is sending to Brazil. The minister of sport has asked the coach Stephen Keshi, to choose at least a player from each of the 36 Nigerian states, making sure each ethnic group is fairly represented.

“Make sure the players from the North are at least 50% in the team. For the South, 25% should be from the West, and 25% for the East. We don’t want to cause frustration to local populations because they won’t have any player from their ethnic group in the team. It’s a national team, you understand. Every son and daughter of this country should feel well represented.” said the Nigerian Minister of Sports Dr Tamuno Danagog.

Stephen Keshi, who is one of only two people, along with Egypt’s Mahmoud El-Gohary, to have won the Africa Cup of Nations as both a player and a coach, kindly told the minister that sport is not about the West, the south, the north or the Ibo, the Yoruba or the Haoussa.

“Minister, please understand that this is high level sport. We need the best players, only the best ones, where ever the region they come from, or whatever their ethnicity or language. We will not be able to win a single match if I’d select players based on their language or region of birth. Please, Minister, kindly reconsider your position.” pleaded the coach Stephen Keshi.
The Minister won’t hear the coach, because he has an upcoming election to win, and won’t let a competition of 11 boys running after a small ball on a green field in Brazil stand on the way of his political savviness.
The coach Stephen Keshi was obliged to comply.

The 23 players he has selected are 50% from the north, 25% from West and 25% from the East. In some region, he couldn’t even find 3rd division players, so he was obliged to include some college amateur players in the national team. Also, Some people who will be traveling with the national team to Brazil will be there only because Keshi couldn’t find any player at all in some ethnic group, so he promised the Minister he will give them free tickets, all expenses covered to travel to Brazil to enjoy. The Minister was happy.

If you are upset reading this, let me tell you this how nigerian government’s cabinet are formed. I just used the football analogy to make you understand how absurd is the idea of a federal government which is not made of the best people Nigeria has, but formed depends on ethnic or regional representation.
If all Nigerians understand that to win a football match, they don’t care about the ethnic background of the players, I think they would understand that to win the war against poverty, the war against illiteracy, the war against pollution, the war against power disruption, the war against corruption, the Nigerian government should be made only of the best and finest of our people, regardless of their background.

There is a daily worldwide governments’ competition to beat each other, and secure a better future for their citizen. Tough less visible, and less noisy, it still is there, and we better win at that competition too!
Our future depends more on our government quality, than on winning a soccer competition!
Go, Go, Go, Naija! Bring back the Cup!

from here

"A bunch of losers"

As the Brazil World Cup approaches, South Africa reflects upon the legacy of its own hosting of the event.

Nine stadiums  built or renovated for the World Cup to the tune of 10 billion rand - a quarter of the overall budget - all are in the red, unable to attract regular sporting events or concerts. The Nelson Mandela Bay stadium in the decaying industrial city of Port Elizabeth supports the case.

The current tenants of the state-of-the-art 47,000-seat, 2.1 billion rand venue are the Southern Kings, a second-tier rugby side excluded last year from the lucrative Super XV competition that includes teams from Australia and New Zealand. The Port Elizabeth region has also not had a team in the Premier Soccer League (PSL) since 2006, and even if a local side clawed its way into the big time, the turnstiles will not be overworked - the average PSL game attracts crowds of just 7,000. Since it opened its doors before the World Cup, the stadium has been attracting on average just over 300,000 visitors a year, only three times the record 94,700 who turned up on one day at Soccer City to watch the South African Springbok rugby side play New Zealand in 2010. Its annual up-keep costs may be as high as 65 million rand, according to two university studies, but the owners concede that it runs at a loss of 13 million rand a year - a bill that the municipality has to pick up.

The bill for the under-used and loss-making stadiums' up-keep falls on cash-strapped municipalities, a salutary lesson for Brazil, where hundreds of thousands have protested, sometimes violently, against state spending on this year's tournament. The bill for their up-keep falls on cash-strapped municipalities, a salutary lesson for Brazil, where hundreds of thousands have protested, sometimes violently, against state spending on this year's tournament.

Brazil's anti-World Cup movement argues that the $11.7 billion earmarked for Cup-related spending - three times South Africa's budget - would have been better used on hospitals, schools and public transport. Many in South Africa feel the same way.

"If 50 per cent of the collective resources deployed around the World Cup were deployed around these critical issues, I think the country would have made a big, big leap forward," said Achille Mbembe, a social scientist at Johannesburg's Wits University.

 FIFA and the South African Football Association (SAFA) urged people to focus on "non-tangible" benefits such as an improved national team and the rebranding of a country plagued by violent crime. Whereas tourism numbers have risen since the tournament the sporting benefits are debatable. The national soccer team, Bafana Bafana, failed to qualify for the 2014 World Cup and are currently languishing at 65 in the world rankings, having slid from a short-lived post-World Cup high of 38th in 2011. Since 2010, the side has also struggled in the bi-annual African Nations Cup, qualifying for only one tournament by virtue of being the host. The under-20 and under-23 teams have also failed to get in to any major events.  Bafana Bafana manager Gordon Igesund - the 17th coach since South Africa's admission to international football in 1992  got his marching orders as national coach this week after presiding over a string of lackluster performances and goal-less draws that prompted sports minister Fikile Mbalula to brand the side "a bunch of losers".

From here

World Cup -White Elephants

South Africa spent a whopping 38 billion rand (£3.7 billion) on stadiums and infrastructure to realise the vision of Africa's first World Cup.

Neal Collins, a South African-born author and journalist explains Fifa left behind them a shameful legacy of empty stadiums.
"The white elephants - 10 magnificent football stadiums lying empty and unused - serve as a constant reminder of the expensive legacy of the Fifa World Cup,"

Collins says: "In Polokwane, the new Peter Mokabe stadium, capacity 45,000, sits unused next to the old Peter Mokabe stadium, capacity 20,000, which was quite suitable for South Africa’s northernmost city. In rural Nelspruit, the Mbombela Stadium has no suitors. Neither city has a side in the local Premier League."

In Durban the Moses Mabhida stadium was recently snubbed by neighbouring rugby team the Sharks as its operators searched for a new tenant, whilst cricket bosses are unhappy that the playing areas of all the new stadiums are too small for their sport.

Soccer City in Johannesburg served as the flagship stadium of the World Cup and largest sports venue in Africa. The 95,000 seater venue underwent a £300 million renovation before the World Cup and costs around £250,000 a month to maintain.It is regarded as the de facto national stadium for the South African football team but other than the occasional derbies between local rivals Kaizer Chiefs and the Orlando Pirates, the stadium has struggled to generate post World Cup revenue.

Cape Town's Green Point stadium, which hosted England's second group match against Algeria, hosts the odd Ajax Cape Town football match, luring an average of 7,000 supporters to the venue which has a capacity of 55,000 (reduced from 64,000) after the World Cup.

World Cup Losers

Socialist Banner makes no apologies for drawing attention yet again to the wasteful World Cup jamboree.
South Africa , a land of fabulous wealth, with 90% of the world’s known platinum reserves, 80% of its manganese, 70% of its chrome and 40% of its gold, as well as rich coal deposits. Plans to develop a satellite programme (in co-operation with India and Brazil). Ten stadiums newly built or upgraded at a cost of 15 billion rand. Rachael Zulu, a 43 year-old mother of two, says there is no way she could afford to buy a ticket to see the national side ''Bafana, Bafana'' play at any of the new stadiums. ''I don't know of anybody living here who is going to the World Cup; we are all poor .I don't know of anybody living here who is going to the World Cup; we are all poor,'' she says. In 2008 three-quarters of South Africans had incomes below 50,000 rand a year (83% were black ) – Only 0.6% of South Africans earned over 750,000 rand, (of whom three-quarters were white and 16% ,or about 30,000 individuals, black)
Rampant corruption and patronage throughout the public sector;
the world’s highest unemployment rate, with more than one in three out of work;
one in eight of the population infected with HIV/AIDS; public hospitals described as “death traps” by their own health minister;
80% of schools deemed dysfunctional;
terrible drug and alcohol abuse;
One in five teenagers aged 15-17 had tried to commit suicide
a crumbling infrastructure; lethal roads.
40% of the population still lives on less than $2 a day.
Although the world’s 24th-biggest economy, South Africa ranks 129th out of 182 on the UN’s Human Development Index (and 12th in Africa).

50 murders, 100 rapes, 330 armed robberies and 550 violent assaults are recorded every day. South Africa now has 300,000 private security guards, almost double the number of police. “We are scared to the point where we are no longer free.” Max Price, the vice-chancellor of the University of Cape Town, said after the murder in March of yet another member of the university’s staff: “We no longer trust strangers and we hate what we have become.”

The World Cup - the homeless cry "FOUL"

It's all warming up for the World Cup now . We have had the tournament's draw for the sections and we have the homeless being forced from the streets.
Isaac Lewis said that police have arrested him for loitering six times in the past month. Before that, Lewis said police mostly left him alone.
Police harassment he said "is increasing, everyday it's increasing," he said. "It's because they want to make a good impression for the foreigners coming. We are like insects to them, or flies."

Lesley de Rueck, Cape Town's director of 2010 operations, denied the city was pressuring the homeless for the World Cup's sake. Felicity Purchase, a city councilwoman and member of a mayoral committee on economic development and tourism, said that the city wanted to get people off the streets for their own good as well as to keep the city "tidy."

Jason Brickhill of the Legal Resources Center, an independent human rights group based in Johannesburg, stated homeless South Africans in Pretoria and Johannesburg, two of the other cities where the tournament will be staged, are also being arrested by police for loitering, and illegal evictions are on the increase.
"In my mind it's linked to the World Cup . There has been talk of the need to clean up the streets, where the dirt is the people."

world cup blues

We read that SOUTH AFRICA'S 2010 World Cup looms in less than a year now at a cost to the host government and FIFA, world football's governing body, of at least £4 billion. When the month-long football fest is over, South Africans will be left with 10 magnificent state-of-the-art stadiums.
Stephen Maseko lives in a corrugated iron and mud shack without electricity, running water or a toilet in the shadow of Mbombela Stadium. He knows his home will be demolished before the stadium hosts the first of its four World Cup matches. "I find it difficult to feel proud that we are hosting this World Cup," he said. "To tell you the truth, I do not have time to think about football. My worries are greater."
The 46,000-seat, billion-rand (£74 million) Mbombela Stadium, bristling with 21st-century technology and supported by 18 giant pylons resembling giraffes, was built on 118 hectares of ancestral land from which the Matsafeni, a Swazi tribal clan, were forcibly removed and offered compensation of just one rand, or 7 pence sterling (raised to 8.7m rand, or £655,000, after a series of prolonged court cases).
Pretoria high court judge Ntendeya Mavundla told Mbombela's African National Congress-dominated council that its treatment of the Matsafeni was not much different from that of "colonialists who usurped land from naïve Africans in return for shiny buttons and mirrors."
When the ANC speaker of the Mbombela Council, 44-year-old Jimmy Mohlala, blew the whistle on a 40m rand (£3m) scam between his fellow ANC councillors and the stadium's commercial developers, senior ANC politicians demanded his resignation.
Mohlala refused to step down and was subsequently shot dead by masked gunmen at his home. His assassins have not been caught and police have not investigated the fraud.

Some 70,000 labourers working on the 2010 stadiums, and other World Cup infrastructure such as the new futuristic railway system with British-built engines and carriages, between Johannesburg Airport and the city centre, went on strike last month for better wages. Some labourers on 2010 projects were earning as little as 800 rand (£60) a month. Mildred Mpundu, a single mother of four, was earning 2000 rand (£150) a month with overtime as a labourer at Johannesburg's Soccer City, where the opening and final World Cup matches will be held. Mildred said she could only give her family meat on Sundays, and she added: "People will come to the stadium and think it is very nice. They won't even know that the people who built it can't afford to go inside."
Union official Lesiba Seshoga, who oversaw negotiations at Cape Town's Green Point, Durban's Moses Madhiba and Port Elizabeth's Nelson Mandela stadiums, said:"These workers are not going to benefit from the World Cup in that none of them will be able to afford to watch a game."

Andile Mngxitama, a columnist for the mass circulation Sowetan daily newspaper, said he fears the 2010 World Cup will turn South Africa into a big fun park, with foreign visitors enjoying levels of comfort, safety and security that ordinary people can only dream of. "When the tournament is over," Mngxitama continued, "we will be sitting with major world-class stadiums in a country that can't feed or educate its people. The truth is we don't need the World Cup. Politicians and their connections need it."

A former Anglican archbishop , Njongonkulu Ndungane , of Cape Town has described poverty in South Africa as being worse than ever.

"Never before in the history of South Africa have such large gatherings of people consistently said 'we have no food,'" said the archbishop. "In a country where huge amounts can be spent on the 2010 soccer world cup or increasing salaries, it is unthinkable that so many can go without food."

The cup of plenty ?

South Africa’s budget for hosting the 2010 World Cup this week hit an estimated $3.7 billion. The cost has risen more than twelve-fold from an original estimate of $295 million.

Is the continent’s first hosting of the world’s biggest single-sport event worth the money?

How many hospitals, clinics and schools have been built or improved, in a country where more than four million people live on less than a dollar a day? Will the expense eradicate crime, reduce joblessness, reduce the impact of HIV/AIDS, feed the hungry ?

The legacy of the World Cup is of questionable value, as the country already has good football facilities. A new stadium in Cape Town was built, against the wishes of residents, on a golf course, in a city where there are already two perfectly good stadiums.Other venues are being expanded, at huge cost, but will probably never be filled to capacity after the conclusion of the World Cup.