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Dear friends and fellow South Africans,

South Africa has launched a period of great excitement for the soccer
World Cup. The country is coming together in an emotional and
intentionally constructed exercise of nation building, which involves
the entire population.

We are taking pride in what has been achieved to host this world
event. Under the guidance of our President and his Government, we are
encouraged to indulge in the inebriation of national pride and glory.
To a certain extent this is necessary, benign and will have long-term
benefits for our national psyche.

However, even the brightest silver may have a cloudy lining.

At this time, we must pause to think about all those who will not be
reached by the benefits of the World Cup, especially those in rural
areas, who will see all this glamour and excitement as happening
elsewhere. Many will only hear its distant echoes.

We must realise that there is a great social and economic cost to this
national exercise in nation building and national pride. Huge amounts
of resources have been diverted from necessary social programmes so
that we may have ten extraordinary stadia; at the cost of improvements
we could have made to our hospitals, schools, rural roads, police
stations, sanitation systems and all that which is used by us, the
citizens, every day.

We must also realise that a world event of this nature does not bring
capital investment into South Africa. Any investment brings money in
with the expectation of future profits which will be taken out. For
this reason, foreign investment is only beneficial if its presence in
South Africa is permanent enough to create an expanded beneficial
effect on the economy through the so-called multiplicator, which
effect must be greater than the amount of profits eventually
repatriated. This is an investment cycle.

In the case of the World Cup, the investment cycle is very short. FIFA
is not a charitable organisation, but an international company on par
with McDonalds, General Electric and Mercedes Benz. Its motivation is
economic. Its investment cycle in South Africa is extremely short, in
that the money it puts in will all be taken out as the referee blows
the whistle at the end of the last game.

For this reason, as we rejoice at the commencement of the World Cup,
we must also pause to think about the many people who will lose their
jobs as it ends. Throughout the world, countries which hosted similar
events experienced an economic contraction immediately thereafter.

South Africa is already in an economic crisis and our economy is much
smaller than that of many other countries which chose to pay the price
of hosting such an event. Therefore, the negative economic impact is
going to be relatively greater.

The truth is that we cannot clothe, educate, feed and heal our
children with national pride alone.

As I write this newsletter, I am surrounded by the greatest amount of
noise I have heard in my life. At 12 o'clock on Wednesday 9 June, at
the encouragement of our President, the whole of the country stopped
for five minutes to blow their Vuvuzelas. It might be one of the few
times that all South Africans have done the same thing, at the same
time, for the same reason.

This is all good and well. But let us see whether we cannot use this
precedent to build out of the national unity and consensus forged on
this occasion a new platform which may change the lives of all our
people for the better.

What about having, under the same guidance of our President, a
national day of efficiency and productivity, in which every one of us
commits to increase his or her work output on that day; perhaps to
work an extra fifteen minutes? The proceeds of such an effort could to
be used to assist unemployed South Africans who, after the World Cup,
may constitute as much as 40% of our population.

Yours in the service of the nation,