Bringing the World Cup to one ordinary South African woman

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10 April 2012

For days, Joyce Mfolo, the domestic worker employed by my parents for the past 42 years at their home in Johannesburg, has been walking round with a huge smile on her face. "I have just four words for you," she keeps repeating, "Peter Mokaba Stadium, Polokwane."

Ever since my friend Matthew generously offered me two free tickets he couldn't use to the France v Mexico match in Polokwane, and I asked Joyce, 59, to join me, she has been in her element, phoning her daughter, Margi, and her grandson, Lebo, and revelling in their surprise. "What! Oh, don't tell me that!" Margi, 44, repeatedly exclaimed, while Lebo, 24, couldn't stop screaming, "Granny's going to football!"
The £110 face-value cost of our tickets — equivalent to half the monthly wage for workers like Joyce — means that attending the World Cup is beyond the means of most South Africans.

Nobody in Joyce's circle — none of her family (she is one of 54 grandchildren) or her friends — has been able to afford a ticket, not even the £80 or £50 cheaper tickets in the higher tiers, she says. A limited number of cheap £12 tickets had gone on sale online, but you had to have internet access and a credit card to buy them, again excluding the majority of the 45 million population.

There is some anger here that Fifa is creaming off £2.2 billion in untaxed TV and marketing revenues while saddling the country with such high costs — £4 billion for the building of the stadiums and infrastructure — and effectively pricing many locals out of their own World Cup.
"Fifa takes the gain, we take the pain" is a frequently heard criticism of the business model.

The overwhelming feeling is one of excitement and pride at a World Cup well-managed and executed, but many South Africans also question the vast sums of money that have been diverted away from health, education and impoverished communities into building extra stadiums — some of which, Polokwane included, may soon lie dormant after hosting just four matches, and which were only constructed at Fifa's insistence. Indeed, feelings are running so high that on the morning we leave on our three-hour drive north to Polokwane, Joyce becomes anxious and, minutes after our departure, asks to return to my parents' home because she "needs to tell Jeannie [my mother] something". "If anyone calls for me," she says, "just say I've gone home, please, please, don't say I've gone to the football."

Back in the car, Joyce explains: "Telling my family I am going to a match is one thing, but I don't want my friends to feel jealous. Some are desperate to go and have been talking about nothing else for months, but when Fifa released the tickets, they were so expensive they couldn't afford them. My friends are disappointed — I don't want them to feel even worse because I am going and they are not."

We are also going to visit Joyce's house in a township called Ga Thoka, 15 minutes' drive from the Peter Mokaba Stadium, where I have some unfinished legacy business of my own.

Two years ago, Evening Standard readers may recall, I came here with my sister, my wife, my oldest daughter and her two friends and we spent one of the most memorable summers of our lives expanding Joyce's house.

I had engaged an architect, raised £10,000 and hired a team of builders and for four weeks we lived on-site as we raced against the clock to complete the house — complete with a living room and dining room set around a sunny internal courtyard — in record time. Back then I wrote how we wanted to express our appreciation to Joyce for four decades of loyal service and how, when we showed Joyce the almost completed house, she'd been so overcome with gratitude she could hardly speak.

She'd arrived dressed in a new outfit and as my family and the builders chanted "welcome", she had looped her arm through mine and we'd walked through her front door and into the hallway. For 10 minutes, she had wandered through the new house in a daze. "I've got no words, David," she said later. "I don't know how to thank you for your vision and for what you and your family have done." I had never seen her so happy.

But the house still needed one more crucial week of work: the government had not yet brought water to Joyce's potholed dirt street in Ga Thoka on the outskirts of greater Polokwane, and when they did, Joyce's kitchen and bathroom would have to be plumbed.

At the time, visiting the 46,000-capacity Peter Mokaba Stadium, which was then still under construction — and being built adjacent to an existing stadium that already adequately served local football teams — I wondered how the Government could justify its £120 million price tag when citizens like Joyce still had no water supply. Joyce had shrugged her shoulders, pointed to her "toilet" in a tin shack in the backyard, and laughingly said, "Oh David, I pray for the day when I don't have to use the long-drop."

Water duly arrived in Ga Thoka, but despite dozens of calls from London, I was unable to get the builders back on-site and so, two years on, the house is still just as we left it.

On the drive up to the match, Joyce fills me in on the local gossip. One of the builders, Daniel, a master plasterer who'd taught my daughter to plaster walls, is in jail for stabbing a man in a fight over his girlfriend, she says. And her neighbour, a detective, died last year when his police car rolled in a high-speed chase. His wife used the insurance money to finish their house, says Joyce approvingly.

"You will see, everyone in Ga Thoka is building, building, but not everyone has money to finish," she says.

My personal World Cup mission is to ensure that Joyce's house is finally finished and to that end I have arranged to meet a plumber and builder on-site at 2pm. After assessing what needs to be done, I learn that the municipality-supplied water has insufficient pressure to power a toilet flush or run a bath. The solution, says the plumber, is to put a water tank on a stand above the house. We shake hands on a £3,000 deal.

At 5pm, and with the temperature dipping towards zero, Joyce puts on seven layers of clothing and declares herself ready to go to the football. When I protest that we'll be three hours early, she says: "We must get our money's worth, David."

We drive to the Park and Ride and, with night setting in, board the free bus to the stadium. There are about 250 of us on the bus and from the moment we take off, the vibe is incredible: the vehicle pulsates with singing, chanting and vuvuzelas.

People say the World Cup has united South Africans, and there is a telling moment when the whole bus breaks into the national anthem, which starts with Nkosi Sikeleli Afrika and finishes with the once-hated symbol of apartheid, Die Stem. Five years ago, a bus full of black South Africans — even the middle-class ones who could afford this game — would have simply left out the Afrikaans verses, but today they sing them with gusto.

The first match hosted at the Peter Mokaba Stadium — between unfancied Algeria and Slovenia — had been disappointingly half-empty, but tonight the arena is almost a full house. We have perfect seats, four rows from the pitch near the halfway line, and Joyce, blowing on her vuvuzela like a young girl, drinks in the atmosphere. Her daughter phones her, then her grandson, and she screams with unrestrained joy.

Joyce decides to back France "because they have black players", but the warmth from the Mexicans sitting around us with their giant, humorous hats soon wins her over, and by the end we're all supporting Mexico, who win 2-0.

The next morning, the local paper is full of news that in one week, the World Cup has brought the country a £550 million bonanza in tourist income. I ask Joyce if she thinks it will trickle down to her neighbours in Ga Thoka and whether the World Cup will be good for the country.

"Having the World Cup here makes me feel incredibly proud to be South African," she says. "Many good things can come out of it — we have new roads, though not yet in Ga Thoka," she laughs, "and lots of people have got jobs — but nobody knows if it will be good for us in the end or whether it will be giving us a big headache."

For now, though, Joyce can't stop talking and laughing. "Did you see that big Mexican who offered me a beer, David? He didn't realise that I'm ZCC [Zionist Christian Church] and that I don't drink. Oh-le-lo! What a night! Do you know the last (and only) time I went to a live football match? I was 25, it was apartheid, I sat penned into a small section in the corner with other black people and it was so scary with all the armed police looking at us that I never went again.

"But last night! Oh-le-lo! It's something that I will tell my grandchildren and great-grandchildren. That Granny went to football, to the World Cup, to a real match, not a charf-charf (amateur) match, and with teams from overseas. I will frame the ticket and one day show it to my friends: proof that I, Joyce Mfolo, was there, part of World Cup history."

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