I would like to go back six years, to Athens’ fantastic Olympic Games, which the Greeks obtained in the teeth of intense competition, had a government change mid-way, but then, when the day came, it all jelled together.

I was there for a few days. For all the doubts and the naysayers, the organisation was perfect, the venues top class and it was all a feast of sports.

Yet look at Greece today – few realise it was the Olympic Games that broke Greece’s back. Or rather it showed up a governing class (for it involved both main parties which alternated in government) who thought they could spend their way out of everything without ever looking at the broader picture and the overwhelming debts and deficits.

Sport should be celebrated for what it is. It should never be used for what it is not. Specifically, sport can never be a vehicle of development. It can be a useful addition, it can also be a celebration of the progress a country has made, but never, in no way, can it be the factor that creates growth.

We have seen this clearly with regard to Greece. Will South Africa go the same sorry way? Will Africa?

The World Cup that comes to a close today has been a roaring success for South Africa, an acknowledgment that the country has come a long way from the days of apartheid. The venues were ready on time and are quite good. There have been no outbreaks of thieving or other criminal activity preying on the visitors. The roads to the venues were kept clear and crime was down.

Yet, after this evening, what will happen to the country? It has proved to itself, and to the world, that it could plan a big project, keep to timeframes and do what was expected of it.

But now what? People who visited have come back almost astonished that there is still so much poverty. Even Soweto, the black township for immigrant workers, the focus of so much violence in past years, has improved beyond recognition. There are houses and traffic but there is still widespread poverty.

For these poor, getting the World Cup to their country was a big boost and maybe some of the spending spilled over to them as well. But that’s it. After tonight, when the floodlights are switched off, it will be back again to the same grinding poverty.

There is a social clip, which has been aired over and over again during the World Cup, showing African children including girls playing football despite difficult conditions and persisting as if football was the way out of poverty, malnutrition, lack of educational facilities.

We know where the legend leads to; just like asylum seekers, the ultimate aim is crossing over to Europe, getting registered with some big European team and making millions. I call this the George Weah syndrome, from George Weah, the legendary player of the past decades, who, after having had such a brilliant career himself hoped to do the same for his countrymen until civil war forced him out.

Football can thus be turned into western capitalism’s magnet, sucking people from impoverished countries into a system that promises much but delivers only to a few. This is the story, after all of countries such as Brazil and Argentina where children play on the sandy beaches in preparation for playing in the major leagues in Europe. It has now taken over the minds of African children and will then attempt to do the same with regard to the vast Asian market. See how the major teams aim to get at least one player from Asian countries, as that does wonders for their merchandising. Ask Man Utd.

What this vast sports-fest does is to reinforce the myth that football is an easier alternative to the hard chore of tackling growth, correcting structural mistakes, eliminating corruption, tackling the imbalance of trade and going for sustainable growth.

It is yet another myth that the African continent is a lost one, where there can be no future. There are, on the contrary, some countries even in deepest Africa that have adopted the right strategies, which strategies do not include the football myth.

Football is thus the white man’s opium of the people, replacing religion with more here and now, tangible, results, but by the same token keeping a whole people bound in chains of economic dependency, if not anymore from a colonial master, from the white man’s preferred sport.

Beyond the tactical disquisitions of systems of play, a world cup, as we have seen, can be used to rouse national pride and an upsurge of emotion as the national anthem is played, flags are waved and time stands still for the duration of the game. In this case, actually, in every edition of the World Cup, there are more tears than joy, as team and nations lose and are forced out.

While that is about acceptable in the actual countries from where the teams originate, what about this tiny island where the World Cup has once again been used as a vehicle for merchandising? The multi-coloured flags outside bars tried to attract people inside for the coolness of an AC, for a cold drink and for some good viewing on crystal clear screens. It was also used to boost the sales of HD sets.

People from other countries see all this and wonder what it is about us that makes us prone to this madness every four years, as people prefer to shell out on HD screens than on solar water heaters or PV systems. We tend to want to identify with a bigger country and a bigger team, and make that country and that team ours. Hence the usual carcades, absent this year not because of a police warning but because the teams with the most support turned out to be such failures.

This time round, in my opinion, we also had television jumping on the back of the World Cup and squeezing it to the max. Pride of place must go to the insipid programme called Akkaniti, which seemed to consist, the few times I watched, of teams of young people siding with one country having a go at other people siding with another country. On the contrary, I did not mind Peter Cossai’s raucous live links from Manoel Island where he would be submerged by fans getting progressively out of control.

Then there was, still is, a far grimmer battle going on – using sports as a means to attract and hold people to contracts and bundles instead of allowing people to pick and choose. It’s like going into a shop and being forced to take items you don’t really need if you want to buy a certain object. No amount of meetings of the Social Affairs Committee will solve this, but something far more basic called consumer reaction can and will.

The World Cup is over, by tonight that is. I suspect that those who, locally, tried to use it to boost flagging sales figures did not do all that well because everyone jumped on the bandwagon, because people no longer have that kind of spare cash to throw around, possibly because people are not as crazy as the marketing managers make them out to be.

Whoever wins this evening will find out that the initial euphoria quickly evaporates, more so during a recession. For those who did not win, it will be back to the grindstone to see how to get out of the risk of another dip in the recession, how to reclaim back the money that has been spent to douse the fires and how to get the country’s figures back to growth.

For those who succumbed to the football myth, when the floodlights are dimmed and daily life returns, it will be a cruel awakening to reality, that football is no short cut to riches and that there is no simple alternative to hard work and the proper framework.

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