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."