(CNN) — South African activists are staging a “Poor People’s World Cup” to protest the exclusion of poor communities from the FIFA tournament.
The Cape Town-based Anti-Eviction Campaign (AEC) says it is staging the event because most South Africans are not benefiting from the official World Cup.
It says poor people can’t afford match tickets and claims traders are being stopped from trading near stadiums, and that people were evicted from their homes in the run up to the competition.
AEC coordinator Ashraf Cassiem told CNN, “It’s an attempt by poor people in Cape Town to bring to attention their plight as a result of the World Cup and the effect it has on communities.
“It’s a platform created by poor people, for poor people, to expose the evictions and displacements affecting poor people in a negative way.”
People from 40 Cape Town communities have formed 36 teams, each of which is representing a World Cup nation — plus four others.
The tournament kicked off on 13 June at a playing field next to Athlone stadium and will continue over the next three Sundays.
“Everybody is crazy excited about it,” said Cassiem. “More than 1,500 turned up despite a lack of transport for fans or communities. People here are really crazy about soccer but won’t get the opportunity to participate in the real FIFA World Cup.”
Cassiem said that poor South Africans would love the chance to see their footballing heroes play in the FIFA competition, but most can’t afford match tickets. He said the cheapest tickets cost more than some people earn in a week.
FIFA general secretary Jerome Valcke last month conceded that tickets might be too expensive for most Africans, with just 40,000 people from the rest of Africa traveling to South Africa for the World Cup.
And rather than benefiting financially from the influx of visitors, Cassiem claimed many people are losing their livelihoods to the World Cup.
He said many informal street traders aren’t allowed to trade around World Cup stadiums, in an effort to protect FIFA’s official partners, and that many street vendors have been cleared from their usual trading locations in a bid to “clean up” Cape Town.
“Even the fan parks are run by FIFA and all goods traded in South Africa now have to FIFA compliant,” said Cassiem.
“If you make goods with ‘2010’ on them, they are confiscated. For the next month and a half at least, FIFA owns all these host cities — and they get the revenue.”
In April, informal traders’ spokesperson Cheche Selepe said he believed FIFA should adjust its rules and allow non-sponsors to sell their merchandise inside stadium perimeters.
“This is the African continent, there is great under-development,” he said.
“There is big poverty in the country and therefore the majority of those survive in the informal sector of the economy, so to push them aside will be a recipe for disaster as far as we are concerned.”
The AEC also claims some Cape Town residents have been moved to “Temporary Relocation Centers” outside the city in order to accommodate regeneration projects for the World Cup, and that homeless people have been removed so as not to offend visiting football fans.
It says many of those are living in one-room dwellings with corrugated-iron roofs at a relocation area around 20 kilometers from the city, known as “Blikkiesdorp” — Afrikaans for “Tin Can Town.” Cassiem said Blikkiesdorp’s residents are cut off from the city, with little access to transport, shops, or work.
Those claims were denied by city authorities. City of Cape Town spokesperson Kylie Hatton told CNN that while there are FIFA-operated exclusion zones around stadiums, which have certain commercial agreements in place, street traders have not lost out because of the World Cup.
She said informal traders who have been moved to accommodate “Fan Fest” areas — public screenings of World Cup matches — are benefiting by being allowed to trade next to the Fan Fest areas and along a 2 ½ kilometer “Fan Walk” from the city’s train station.
“There’s been no relocation of people as a result of the World Cup,” she said, adding that rehousing in temporary relocation centers is part of an ongoing attempt to relieve the city’s chronic housing shortage.
She described Blikkiesdorp as an “emergency housing area” of approximately 1,400 units, each housing four to five people.
“Blikkiesdorp was established in 2008 for people evicted from houses they had illegally occupied, completely unrelated to World Cup,” said Hatton
“We have expanded Blikkiesdorp for people who have been living in unsafe buildings, people who have been the victims of flooding or fire, people who have been homeless and living in unsafe areas — none of it the result of the World Cup.”
Hatton said the World Cup had brought $1.85 billion dollars of government investment in the city’s infrastructure — money that’s been spent on a new airport, and improvements to the transport system.
But Cassiem told CNN the city’s poor were seeing few benefits. “The official statistics say stadium construction created 150,000 jobs, but it was temporary, and now those 150,000 people are unemployed again,” he said.
He said while Cape Town’s poor initially had high expectations for the World Cup, they had been excluded from consultation and participation in the event.
But he added that poor communities thought there was one upside to the tournament. “They say, ‘this benefits us because we get the opportunity to show the world what’s really happening in South Africa.'”
Be the first to comment