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Johannesburg - The World Cup alone cannot solve the racial tensions that still linger in South Africa 16 years after the formal end of apartheid, the chief organizer of the tournament, Danny Jordaan has conceded.
In an interview with the German Press Agency dpa before the weekend, the chief executive of the World Cup local organizing committee downplayed the potential of the month-long tournament to finish the task of racial reconciliation begun by iconic former president Nelson Mandela on his release from an apartheid prison in 1990.
"If nation building is simply based on a match or on an event, then you are simply building 90-minutes patriots," Jordaan said, referring to the duration of a football game.
"When the match is over or the event is over we go to our own lives and then find a new basis on which to interact," he said.
South African officials, including Jordaan, have been stressing the importance of hosting the World Cup in uniting blacks and whites behind a common goal.
They point to the 1995 Rugby World Cup in South Africa as an example. Black South Africans joined whites in celebrating the victory of the local Springboks team a year after blacks first got a vote in the country's first democratic elections.
Some analysts say there has been a backslide in race relations since then. Incidents of racially-charged verbal and physical abuse are common.
"You have to change the material conditions on the ground to deal with those issues," Jordaan told dpa, listing education as a key legacy project of the Cup aimed at erasing high levels of inequality.
FIFA's 1GOAL campaign aims to improve access to education in Africa, where 40 million children go without schooling.
Above all, South Africa's key motivation in hosting the World Cup is to avoid going down the often bumpy road of other previously colonized or subjugated countries, Jordaan said.
"If you look back, you'll see that in the post-independence or post-democracy period on the African continent, and in most developing countries, immediately after liberation day, there's infrastructure decline," he said.
"If you go back five years (after independence) you see the infrastructure collapse."
"We said it's not going to happen in South Africa, and one of the ways you do that is by hosting events," the former anti-apartheid activist and politician from the southern city of Port Elizabeth said.
Playing host to the world's most-watched sporting event has come with a hefty price tag. The government has spent an estimated 34 billion rand to build and upgrade 10 World Cup stadiums, build and expand airports, roads, and in Gauteng province, a new light-rail system and a new bus system.
That spending has drawn criticism in some quarters, particularly since it has become clear that the number of foreign football fans coming to the tournament will be far fewer than initially expected.
World football body FIFA, owner of the World Cup, has revised its forecast from 450,000 fans to around 350,000.
Jordaan says that the main benefit of the tournament is that it forced South Africa to develop infrastructure "that every other city had in Germany, whether its Berlin or Frankfurt."
"Our cities must be on a par with those cities," Jordaan said.
Ramshackle infrastructure, particularly transport, is seen as one of the biggest impediments to ending poverty in Africa.
The rollout of a bus rapid transit system in Johannesburg, and the expected launch by the start of the World Cup of the Gautrain light rail link between Johannesburg and Pretoria will take South Africa a step closer towards a reliable, integrated public transport system. Currently, public transport is dominated by privately-owned minibus taxis.
