World soccer governing body Fifa on Tuesday brushed aside lingering doubts about South Africa’s readiness for the World Cup, as cities across the nation staged dance parties and celebrations to launch the 100-day countdown.

Fifa president Sepp Blatter insisted the country was ready to host Africa’s first World Cup, which kicks off on June 11, and said he was bothered by naysayers who worry South Africa won’t pull it off.

“It’s not so much that there’s pessimism, but that it’s always being thrown into doubt. It’s bad, because when there’s doubt, there’s no confidence. For me and Fifa, that bothers us sometimes,” Blatter told a news conference in Durban.

“There is no doubt, no doubt,” he said. “Let’s go now, let’s have this World Cup, and then we will discuss it at the end of July.”

He spoke after a tour of South Africa’s 10 stadiums that will host the month-long tournament. Construction is complete at all the stadiums, and only two have yet to host games to try out the new facilities.

“We are on track, we are ready to make this World Cup and this is the main message following this inspection tour,” Fifa secretary general Jerome Valcke said.

The 100-day countdown dominated South African media on Tuesday, with celebrations planned in all the country’s main cities.

Read more here.

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The arrest of a student for “swearing” at President Jacob Zuma’s convoy is a tactic of a police state, not a democracy, the Democratic Alliance (DA) said on Wednesday.

DA leader Helen Zille said the way the police acted was a reminder of the actions of the apartheid-era security police.

“They are reminiscent of Robert Mugabe’s Zimbabwe, which the African National Congress is increasingly trying to emulate,” said Zille.

Chumani Maxwele was arrested on Wednesday last week when he allegedly showed his middle finger to Zuma’s convoy while he was jogging in De Waal Street in Cape Town. He was arrested at gunpoint by police officers.

He allegedly had a bag pulled over his head and was first taken to Zuma’s residence, before he was taken to Rondebosch and then the Mowbray police station, where he was allegedly interrogated by intelligence officers.

He was kept for just less than 24 hours and was released before appearing in court on charges of crimen injuria and resisting arrest.

Zweli Mnisi, spokesperson for the Police Ministry, said Maxwele became aggressive when he was questioned by police.

“Aggression towards the police is unacceptable and will not be tolerated,” said Mnisi.

“These are the tactics of a police state, not a democracy.” said Zille, who stated that this was the latest in a series of “shameful incidents” by the VIP unit, with no action taken against officers who allegedly overstepped the mark.

“The DA won’t allow this to happen again, we will ensure that those responsible are held to account,” she said. “Under the ANC, there is one law for Jacob Zuma and his cronies, and another for the rest of the country.”

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Chanting “Viva, Nelson Mandela, Viva,” thousands of South Africans marked 20 years on Thursday since the anti-apartheid icon walked to freedom after 27 years as a political prisoner.

Now a frail 91-year-old, Mandela did not attend the celebrations at the Drakenstein Prison near Cape Town, although a huge bronze statue of him marching from jail, fist pumping the air, towered over the crowd much as Mandela’s image towers over South African politics and society to this day.

Among the predominantly black crowd of well-wishers waving the black, green and gold flags of Mandela’s African National Congress (ANC) were fellow “struggle” heroes present on that momentous Sunday two decades ago. “It was all a bit chaotic and I must tell you we were unprepared,” said millionaire businessman Cyril Ramaphosa — then a senior mining union and ANC official — recalling the chaotic scenes that followed Mandela’s release.

Unbanned only nine days previously, ANC leaders were given just 24 hours’ notice to prepare for the release of Mandela, who four years later would become the first black president of a country dominated by a white minority for 300 years.

Mandela’s push for reconciliation during his 1994 to 1999 presidency is credited with unifying the racially divided nation and laying the foundations of the democracy that oversees the continent’s biggest economy.

“He means a lot to the country, from his release, even still today,” said conservationist Elizabeth Davids (42).

“He freed us all from apartheid. Before we never mixed with each other, coloureds, whites and blacks were separate but now we all mix together and are like one nation.”

Read more here.

A South African community is to challenge German homeopathic giant Schwabe Pharmaceuticals in court in Munich next week over a traditional medicine the company is seeking to patent.

The case could set a precedent in cases in which multinationals use the plants and indigenous knowledge of developing countries, where laws may not protect communities’ intellectual property rights.

Schwabe wants to patent a method for producing extracts from the roots of Pelargonium sidoides and Pelargonium reniforme to make cough and cold syrups. The company has also hit problems in India over alleged bioprospecting.

The community, in Alice in the Eastern Cape, said the extraction method has been used for generations by traditional healers and Schwabe has no right to patent it.

Community member Nomthunzi Sizani said she grew up with the plant and it was trusted in her community as a flu and cough remedy.

“The community wants to stop [companies] from saying they were the first to know that this medicine is important, because we grew up knowing that. They are like thieves, stealing the indigenous knowledge,” she said.

The plant is endemic to Southern Africa, especially the Eastern Cape and Lesotho. The Zulu, Basotho, Xhosa and Mfengu peoples have used it for centuries to treat respiratory complaints, and the compound it contains, cumerin, is now a key ingredient in remedies.

The Alice community is supported by the Africa Centre for Biosafety and the Swiss biopiracy watchdog, the Berne Declaration.

Read more here.

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Are South Africans not supporting their own soccer team … or just typically leaving things to the last minute?

Or perhaps the 2010 local organising committee (LOC) has finally recognised that the ticket-purchasing process is simply too complicated.

The LOC told the Mail & Guardian on Thursday that the organisation will sell tickets over the counter at a later stage. For now the few South Africans who have credit cards and internet access have had to contend with a complicated application process on Fifa’s website, and the rest have to stand in line at First National Bank.

LOC chief executive officer, Danny Jordaan, complained on Tuesday that fewer than 100,000 tickets have been sold to fans in the six African countries competing in the finals. He was particularly worried that few local fans were buying tickets for Bafana Bafana’s Group A matches against Mexico, Uruguay and France.

But while Jordaan raised concerns about the pace of ticket sales among South Africans, Fifa figures indicate that 50% of tickets sold during the first two sales phases have been snapped up by South Africans — 361 000 of 672 000.

And it seems that of the tickets they are buying, South Africans are supporting mostly non-African teams. Jordaan said on Tuesday: “This will be the first time in World Cup history that the host nation is not topping the ticket sales list.

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The current economic crisis could push an additional 90 million people around the world into extreme poverty by end of 2010. If it persists, two million children could die in the next five years. And in sub-Saharan Africa, the crisis could undermine recent progress through declines in commodity prices, tourism earnings, exports, remittances and private capital flows.

Before the crisis, the region’s gross domestic product (GDP) had been growing since 2004 at more than five percent a year. Foreign direct investment (FDI) had contributed to this growth, with net FDI inflows increasing from U.S. $13 billion in 2004 to about $29 billion in 2007.

But now growth is likely to fall to 1.7 percent in 2009. Thirteen countries could experience a decline in per capita income of more than 10 percent on average. Unemployment could rise further in a number of countries. For example, in South Africa it climbed from 23.6 percent in the second quarter of 2009 to 24.5 percent in the third quarter, with the economy contracting by about two percent over the year.

Dealing with the economic and human impacts of the crisis in Africa requires both re-invigorated financial flows and more effective use of funds. Similar volumes of spending in the past have produced vastly different development outcomes. The World Bank Group’s Independent Evaluation Group, on the basis of country reviews, highlights a number of factors driving the quantity and quality of the crisis response.

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Adding to the growing flux of carbon emissions into the atmosphere is the burst of hot air issuing from the world’s most powerful leaders who, to the dismay of the G77 countries, reached an ‘11th hour agreement between 27 key countries on a watered-down declaration’, reports Denmark’s Politiken.

South Africa’s Mail & Guardian writes that Sudan’s delegation spoke in less euphemistic terms, saying that the results of the brokered accord in Africa ‘would be like the Holocaust by causing more deadly floods, droughts, mudslides, sandstorms and rising seas.’ According to Sudan’s Lumumba Stanislaus Di-aping, the document ‘is a solution based on the same very values, in our opinion, that channelled six million people in Europe into furnaces.’

Despite Sudan’s strong language, which received a rebuke from Sweden’s chief negotiator Anders Turesson, Bangladesh’s The Daily Star confirms the G77’s opinion that the deal is ‘inadequate.’

As The Guardian writes:

The deal was brokered between China, South Africa, India, Brazil and the US, but late last night it was still unclear whether it would be adopted by all 192 countries in the full plenary session.

The agreement aims to provide $30bn in funding for poor countries to adapt to climate change from next year to 2012, and $100bn a year after 2020.

But it disappointed African and other vulnerable countries who had been holding out for far deeper emission cuts to hold the global temperature rise to 1.5C this century. As widely expected, all references to 1.5C in previous drafts were removed at the last minute, but more surprisingly, the earlier 2050 goal of reducing global CO2 emissions by 80% was also dropped.

It would appear, then, that the developed countries lacked the ‘moral leadership’ Maldives President Mohamed Nasheed called for during a meeting with President of the European Commission, Mr José Manuel Durão Barroso. Miadhu News, in fact, states that in ‘referring to the EU’s commitment to reducing emissions by 20% by 2020 and by 30% when other developed countries make comparable efforts, President Nasheed stated that the 30% target should not be conditional.’

However, New Scientist writes in its blog that the result of this much-hyped gathering is a ‘draft text [which] is the most vague we’ve seen so far, with all specific targets for cutting emissions stripped out, replaced by a list of the commitments that various nations have already made.’

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Image by Getty Images via Daylife

Getting ready for a World Cup is maybe one of the best experiences you can have in this world.

That magic surrounding the event is simply unique and normally goes far beyond those 30 days between June and July. Once, the draw would be live on TV but without that scenic perspective we are used to nowadays. And, above all, there was no Charlize Theron patronizing it but simply a kid extracting the names of the nations from a pottery box. The kid in fact was the essence of the game: when people play or simply watch football feel younger, and games normally take them back to the days gone by. Basically, they enjoy themselves. The beautiful Charlize indeed represents everything soccer has turned into in the recent years: surface and ostentation, that is marketing in one word. Something you have to illusion to possess but is fleeting indeed. Otherwise how can that be that the draw was set to begin at 6 pm and Mr.Jerome Valcke (Draw Master and FIFA Secretary General) only extracted the first ball (which everybody knew it was South Africa – Group A1) one hour later? There were guests (between them singer Johnny Clegg), sports champions and people representing South Africa (and the continent itself more generally) to introduce, but as soon as it was all getting too boring to stand, the draw suddenly started. And it was fast. Here’s what next summer (or winter if you live in the other hemisphere) has in store:

Group A: South Africa, Mexico, Uruguay, France
Group B: Argentina, Nigeria, Korea Republic, Greece
Group C: England, USA, Algeria, Slovenia
Group D: Germany, Australia, Serbia, Ghana,
Group E: Netherlands, Denmark, Japan, Cameroon
Group F: Italy, Paraguay, New Zealand, Slovakia
Group G: Brazil, Korea DPR, Ivory Coast, Portugal
Group H: Spain, Switzerland, Honduras, Chile

The teams that get first and second in every group collapse in the eight finals and then progress to the final at the 95,000 all-seated Soccer City in Johannesburg on July 11^th.

Of course, the group that promises to be the most enthralling and entertaining of all is Group G where Brazil v Portugal has the taste of a derby and Ivory Coast (at the second successive appearance) is ready to steal the scene. But the same can be said about European Champions Spain who face both hyper-offensive Chile and Honduras (who went through after a revival of the 1969 qualifiers that triggered the so-called “Soccer war” against El Salvador), who are both Spanish speaking countries, in Group H. Besides, Spain will face Switzerland who played hosts in the last Euro Cup which the Red Furies won. Talking about language derbies, what about England v United States? The two Anglophone countries only met once in the World Cup and it was back in 1950 in Brazil. USA won 1-0 and England were humiliated that day (June 29^th) since they never expected such a reverse at the expense of newcomers United States. It was humiliating especially because they considered themselves soccer masters and didn’t even show up in the previous two World Cups because they thought they were much better than the rest. What’s more, the two nations are currently rivals in the 2018 World Cup bid which in the end could favor England. USA hosted the World Cup only 15 years ago and in a competition that is played every 4 years, the time span is just too short. By the way, in Group B Argentina, Nigeria and Greece will relive the American dream and their encounters played in Foxborough in 1994. Talking about flashbacks, neither France is alien to the feeling since they got their only point in 2002 against Uruguay. After all the France v EIRE scandal, every soccer fan will basically support every team that face Raymond Domenech’s men (Mexico included, even if you’re American!). Incidentally, at FIFA HQ they thought that instant replay wasn’t a good idea (who knows why) and everyone has been left with the question whether we are really approaching 2010 or not. Platini says that they would need 25 TV cameras (and 200,000 euros) to follow closely the action even at a Far Oer v Estonia game. But he totally forgets that the fourth referee could use a costless screen to judge any iffy action (that is the same that happens in any other normal sport)! What is he talking about? Is he just defending France?

Other groups deserve a mention of course. Group C, D and E are actually well balanced. Holders Italy will face South America’s sensation Paraguay who led the pack in the qualifiers for several months. New Zealand will only join the World Cup festival for the second time in their history (Spain 1982 with Italy crowned champions was the first one), while Slovakia will be there for the first time as a single unit (while Czechoslovakia had many more caps on their records). Watch out for new coaches coming in. Former LA Galaxy coach Ruud Gullit and former Inter Milan coach Roberto Mancini were both drawn close to Nigeria.

All in all, the second winter World Cup in history (the first one was played in Argentina in 1978) promises to be very hot! Let’s hope everyone can celebrate in the end as the name of the official ball suggests (“Jabulani” means “to celebrate” in Zulu language)! Even if there’s no kid anymore at the opening ceremony…

NUMBERS

It’s the ninth time in 19 editions that all the countries that have lifted the World Cup at least once in their history all qualify to the final phase;

all five continents will be represented for only the third time (the other two were Spain in 1982 and Germany in 2006);

Most appearances:

20 – Brazil (2014 included since they will be the hosts)

17 – Germany + Italy

15 – Argentina

14 – Mexico

MONEY

1,5 billions is the budget allocated for the new stadiums

21 dollars – the price for the cheapest ticket

340 dollars – the price for the most expensive ticket

SAFETY

50 homicides per day is the average in South Africa

41,000 policemen will patrol the soccer and tourist areas

1 Police Department was established on purpose

11,5 millions of tourists will flow there between June and July

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South Africa announced ambitious new plans on Tuesday for earlier and expanded treatment for HIV-positive babies and pregnant women, a change that could save hundreds of thousands of lives in the nation hardest hit by the virus that causes HIV/Aids, says the Mail & Guardian.

President Jacob Zuma — once ridiculed for saying a shower could prevent HIV/Aids — was cheered as he outlined the measures on World Aids Day. The new policy marks a dramatic shift from former

President Thabo Mbeki, whose health minister distrusted drugs developed to keep Aids patients alive and instead promoted garlic and beetroot treatments. Those policies led to more than 300 000 premature deaths, a Harvard study concluded.

The changes are in line with new guidelines issued a day earlier by the World Health Organisation that call for HIV-infected pregnant women to be given drugs earlier and while breast-feeding.

By treating all HIV-infected babies, survival rates should also improve for the youngest citizens in South Africa, one of only 12 countries where child mortality has worsened since 1990, in part due to Aids.

Zuma compared the fight against HIV, which infects one in 10 South Africans, to the decades-long struggle against the apartheid government.

“At another moment in our history, in another context, the liberation movement observed that the time comes in the life of any nation when there remain only two choices: submit or fight,” Zuma
said. “That time has now come in our struggle to overcome Aids. Let us declare now, as we declared then, that we shall not submit.”

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The numbers surrounding the 2010 Fifa World Cup draw to be held here on Friday are both record-breaking and staggering, reports All Africa.

The show, which will last around 90 minutes, will be beamed to 200 countries, a massive leap from the 137 countries for the draw for Germany 2006. Viewership figures are set to exceed the 130 million who watched the names come out the pots four years ago, with some estimates putting the number at 200 million.

The glitz and glamour will be provided by Hollywood actress Charlize Theron, a native of South Africa, while the footballing razzmatazz comes in the form of another Hollywood couple, English icon David Beckham and his wife Victoria. They’ll be there to provide images for newspapers around the world.

More important, 27 of the 32 coaches of the national teams which have qualified for the tournament had confirmed by Monday that they will be here.

But there will be one notable absentee: Argentine tactician Diego Maradona was banned from football for two months by Fifa following a foul-mouthed tirade to the press after his side qualified for the finals by beating Uruguay in October. The ban extends to attending the draw in Cape Town.

The programme for the draw itself will see South African President Jacob Zuma and Fifa President Sepp Blatter take the stage to give speeches, while there will also be a video production which shows Fifa’s projects in Africa.

Each of the 32 qualifying teams will be individually introduced, and then the history of the World Cup will be portrayed in a video.

Meanwhile, during a charity event in London, U2 lead singer Bono expressed his disappointment at Ireland’s exclusion from the World Cup due to Thierry Henry’s hand ball, which helped qualify the French over the Irish. “I’ll be supporting Ivory Coast,” said the singer. “Their flag’s colors are the same as Ireland’s.”

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