JOHANNESBURG - A few days ago a former contemporary of mine from university wrote and asked me to write a piece for the newspaper he works for in Slovenia. It would be, he suggested, an assessment of how the upcoming World Cup will affect South Africa.
It is a question that I had not paid much thought to up until now. Yet as the request suggests, over the next several weeks the country is going to be subjected to a degree of international interest (and scrutiny) it hasn't experienced since the early 1990s. In one way or another then the World Cup will shape how South Africa is viewed - and perhaps how we see ourselves as well - for years to come.
Obviously, a lot will depend on how the tournament goes. The chances are that we will manage to muddle through, as we usually seem to do. On the one side, if the ANC government had the capacity to make a huge success of the event it would have fixed Joburg's potholes by now. But it hasn't.
On the other, I don't think crime is going to be as big a problem as many expect. The point is that most crimes are easily solvable but few are. According to a recent book only 1 in 8 violent robberies end up in prosecutions. However, given the media coverage that will ensue, there will be huge pressure on the police to clear up any violent crime committed against a foreign football fan during the World Cup. In the circumstances, one would have to be a pretty dumb criminal to target such royal game.
And yet I can't seem to escape a gnawing sense of worry.
Our state will probably manage to deal with the odd incident of criminality. What it will struggle to do is either avert or cope with some kind of catastrophe. The Sunday Times reported this weekend on "growing concern among emergency medical professionals that crumbling public hospitals will not cope with mass casualties in the event of a disaster during the tournament, expected to attract 300000 fans." The newspaper quoted a member of the Local Organising Committee as saying that any emergency with over 200 people injured would pose a major challenge: "There are plans in place which look quite impressive on paper, but not in real life."
The missing narrative in much of the foreign reporting so far has been the progressive decomposition of a once powerful state under ANC rule. The level of corruption in the system is mind-boggling. In a recent article in the Financial Mail Carol Paton wrote that according to a (somewhat hopeful) guesstimate doing the rounds in government 20% of the state procurement budget (or R30bn/year) is being squandered through corruption.
To say that the ANC government lacks the will to deal with the problem is an understatement. President Jacob Zuma appointed cronies - with dubious acquaintances - to run the police and intelligence services. And he chose a malignant melanoma to head up the National Prosecuting Authority.
South Africa's profound vulnerability, brought about by the utter dysfunction of the state, was brought home to me by the story I did last year on a R68m fraud carried out against the South African Revenue Service by a Pakistani criminal syndicate. In order to work their scam the syndicate had penetrated Home Affairs (to get false IDs), Foreign Affairs (for a false visa), the Companies and Intellectual Property Registration Office (to clone companies), the banks (to set up accounts) and SARS itself (to divert tax refunds).
The crime could only be pinned on the accused personally because he was caught red handed at the airport with a book listing all the fake identities and bank accounts that had been used to carry out the fraud. Were it not for that stroke of luck the police would have spent much of their time just chasing ghosts.
I am not sure if the international media grasp how rotten the South African system has become - or what the potential implications are.
The state lacks the integrity to do the most basic checks. Once an identity has been bought it can be used to secure a passport, register a company and open bank accounts. The point is that, at any time over the past six years, a terrorist cell could have arrived in South Africa and disappeared into society without trace.
This is not to say that a terrorist attack is planned. The Mail & Guardian noted in an editorial on Friday "We know there are plenty of international spooks sniffing around, and they seem to be cautiously optimistic." Yet, what is still frightening is that - to a significant degree - the question of whether there will be some kind of terrorist attack or not is in Al-Qaeda's hands not our own.
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