Unnerving mood driving revellers indoors

JOHANNESBURG LETTER:The hosts are friendly but serious crime is still a major concern for those organising and attending the World Cup

WITH THE first round of opening matches at this World Cup due to be completed this afternoon, the tournament’s early crime stats are in – with the tourists enjoying a fractional lead over their hosts so far.

According to South Africa’s National Prosecuting Authority (NPA) there were 21 crimes across the country related in one way or another to the competition with 13 involving foreigners and just eight locals.

There’s been more than a hint of relief to the tone of the reports here on the issue and most of the local newspapers have been keen to provide lengthy list of examples of the sorts of incidents that have occurred. Most of them involve drunk driving, fairly minor thefts or fraud, certainly nothing much that would stand out over a busy weekend back at home – which is in stark contrast to many of the reports relating to crimes perpetrated by and on people who have no connection to the tournament

In yesterday’s Pretoria news, local SuperSport (the South African equivalent of Sky) presenter Peter Davies takes the opportunity to rub the British media’s collective nose in it a bit for what he regards as their sensationalist reporting of the situation in Johannesburg and Sun City (where the England team and press have been based) prior to and since the start of the tournament.

“If it’s not man-eating snakes lurking in Rooney’s closet at the team’s (allegedly half -built) Royal Bafokeng training base, then it’s machete-wielding gangs roaming the suburbs in search of tattooed, overweight Dagenham dole-queuers to ransack and leave gurgling on the pavement,” he sneers in a lengthy open letter.

The pity is, he continues, that the coverage has contributed to keeping people away from the tournament (around 300,000 overseas visitors are now expected, well down on the original estimates) and a country he rather modestly suggests has: “The world’s most beautiful women, the best weather, food and wine from the Gods themselves, wildlife galore and eight channels of SuperSport.”

He might have added ‘some of the planet’s most friendly people’, for my own experience to date has certainly been hugely positive in terms of the eagerness the locals have shown to be friendly and welcoming. The fact remains, however, that the scale of the country’s economic problems and the enormous levels of social exclusion that result from them make crime, particularly in a city of such stark contrasts as Johannesburg, inevitable and Davies’s attack loses just a little of its momentum in the paragraph that starts: “Having said all that . . . ”

Sure enough, he acknowledges that “Joburg is undoubtedly one of the world’s most dangerous cities.”

The concession might just have been made after the story by Karabo Seanego on page three was filed. It concerns a German reporter who got lost while driving in nearby Pretoria, stopped at a petrol station and ended up giving chase to a thief who opening his passenger side door to steal his jacket. Three others appeared to be helping him in the pursuit but actually violently robbed him of money and his shoes as soon as he gave up the chase after which he arrived back to find his car stripped with anything of value gone.

Steffan Dobbert’s misery was then compounded when he went to the city’s central police station where, after a long wait, he was told to go back to the crime scene and get the name of the street without which no investigation could be initiated.

His misfortune, of course, involves just one incident. But after even a few short days down in the far more relaxed Cape Town, the atmosphere in this neck of the woods certainly comes as a little bit of a shock to a first time visitor.

Just as in Cape Town, the walls of private residences and commercial sites are all topped with several lines of razor wire, the fences with large and menacing spikes. What is immediately apparent here, though, is the far greater wariness felt by locals towards getting around any but the most affluent area on foot, especially after dark when nowhere appears to be regarded as safe.

Colleagues who have been based in the city, but outside the soulless if comparatively safe northern rich white enclave of Sandton since arriving in the country, and have attempted to walk around the areas in which they are staying say they have been greeted primarily with polite surprise.

Still, when I tried to leave Ellis Park, in the once fashionable but now run-down Oakland area of the city on Monday night at around 9.45pm the security guards on the gate would not let me walk 70 metres to the media bus stop opposite the old Alhambra theatre by myself. And when it turned out there would be no bus until 10.30, a transport supervisor drove me back to the gate so that I could wait inside the press centre.

The upshot is that the World Cup, which normally brings a festival atmosphere to the streets of the cities in which it is staged, is being driven indoors with tourists not attending matches finding themselves restricted to watching them in bars and restaurants, many of which are located in shopping malls.

The desperation of many locals to experience something less sterile was witnessed over the weekend when more than 100,000 showed up at two Johannesburg fan-parks with the capacity for less than half that number. After a handful of people had been injured due to overcrowding at a similar venue on Friday in Cape Town, organisers here had to turn huge numbers away.

So serious crime is still a significant concern for those organising and attending this tournament but, so far at least, the most pressing risk of injury, statistically speaking, is posed by the excessive enthusiasm of the hosts.