The moguls who battled doubt
Part 3:
pretty hectic. My daughter was born on the 10th of June 2010. I had already been in the camp in Sandton since the end of May and I couldn’t go home.”
Macozoma had to ensure that all teams, administrators, officials and fans could move through the borders smoothly. They also had to be able to travel easily in the country — often at short notice. The Gauteng freeway improvement project that had to be largely completed by 2010 and there was the small matter of getting the Gautrain up and running.
His plate also had hospitality duties lumped on it. This entailed ensuring there were VIP rooms constructed for Fifa guests and dignitaries — and even to finding a chef who could put together a special menu. Everything, of course, had to be done according to the governing body’s spec.
After this experience he would go on to be appointed chief executive of the South African National Roads Agency in 2016.
“I think 50% we learned, 50% we brought our expertise,” Macozoma says. “Fifa can be very peculiar and they’ve got their own ways of doing things. You had to learn the Fifa way otherwise you would have been in conflict with them a lot. And I was [in conflict] because I was a staunch defender of South Africa’s positions and interests, and I did things according to government policy, what I thought ethically was correct. So I butted heads a lot with some of the Fifa people. So much so that at the end of the tournament, I just didn’t want to go to Brazil [2014 World Cup] and I guess they didn’t want me either. So we didn’t bother each other.”
While the LOC was consumed by the mission of delivering on time, an annoying buzzing criticism began to grow louder: South Africa would not be ready.
What began as the usual humdrum criticism from naysayers gained traction and even attracted highprofile voices — such as that of Franz Beckenbauer, one of Germany’s greatest football players and managers, who suggested the best plan might be to move on from the plan to host the World Cup in Africa before it was too late.
Closer to the time, multiple governments began to issue insulting travel advisories to their citizens warning them to be cautious in the dark jungle of Johannesburg. Beckenbauer later changed his mind.
In South Africa, optimism wasn’t exuding from all of our pores either. Could the construction be completed in time? Would our shaky power grid hold up to the increased pressure?
“The biggest problem, I have to be honest with you,” Moholi says solemnly, “is South Africans not having faith in other South Africans. Maybe you can pull up the articles about how bad we were and that sort of thing. They also came from South Africans, not just internationally.
“The thing that people don’t know is that I built up a team from scratch — of young South Africans by the way. People always think that South Africa doesn’t have the capability,” he says. “And secondly it was the most advanced World Cup — way more advanced than Germany [in 2006].”
Indeed, the 2010 World Cup was a success by any conceivable metric. The event reached an estimated global audience of 3.2-billion people, all games went off without issue and the myriad nightmares that the international arena predicted never came to fruition.
Looking back, the one criticism that both Moholi and Macozoma have is the perceived failure of South Africa to capitalise on the moment and the work ethic that had to be summoned to make the World Cup possible. There’s an argument to be made that, in both footballing networks and generally the country, we have yet to match the efficiency and organisational peaks that the 2010 deadline compelled us to reach. But perhaps that’s a discussion all on its own.
The important takeaway, from the patriotic optimist’s perspective, is that South Africa achieved what much of the world said was impossible. No one can ever take that away from us.
“The biggest problem, I have to be honest with you, is South Africans not having faith in other South Africans”