C’mon, time to rebrand your life!

The pursuit of profit in sport now seems unrelenting. Having said goodbye to foreign sports writers and their platitudinous eulogies for the “rainbow nation”, the South African treasury reckons it put $5bn into the World Cup, while corporate sponsors took home more than $4bn in tax-free profits. All those corporate parties, free tickets, kickbacks and other “gifts” merely indulged a post-apartheid elite that presides over the most inequitable society on earth.

Since 2008, following the feverish building of stadiums, several of them unnecessary, more than a million people have lost their jobs. In the wake of the World Cup, 1.3 million public-sector workers have taken strike action for a living wage. The South African police now have paramilitary powers comparable with those they had in the apartheid era.

A new Protection of Information Bill currently before parliament will conceal the corruption of the ruling African National Congress wabenzi (identifiable by their large silver Mercedes). “If journalists have to be fired [or go to prison] because they don’t contribute to the South Africa we want,” said an ANC spokes man, “let it be.”

City of dreams

In India, a similar rebranding is under way for next month’s Commonwealth Games. In the country that has most of the world’s malnourished children, the capital, Delhi, has been rebranded a “world-class city” at a cost of $2.5bn. A school for 180 slum children has been bulldozed so that a vast estate of luxury apartments can be built for visiting athletes.

“They told us we were a security threat so we had to go,” said the head teacher. “All my children were crying.” It is one of many demolitions; over 100,000 families have been evicted to make way for “security zones” around the Games and facilities that will mostly benefit India’s small but powerful managerial and technocratic class which, besotted with all things corporate, prefers not to be reminded that 77 per cent of its compatriots are dirt poor.

(via Instapaper)