London - One-sided reporting on South Africa by the foreign media continues to damage the country's brand, says Pierre van der Hoven, CEO of destination marketing company Southern Africa Direct.
"Clearly we cannot expect the foreign media to put South Africa in a positive light ahead of the 2010 Fifa World Cup - we simply have to do it ourselves," Van der Hoven said, reacting to an article that appeared in the British Sunday Times this weekend.
It portrayed South Africa as a xenophobic nation flooded with starving refugees, where regular power outages are experienced and traffic lights are not maintained.
The article, "Starvation kills hopes of South Africa's rubbish-tip refugees ..." read: "Incomers hoping for opportunities from the 2010 Football World Cup are instead finding xenophobia, poverty, poor wages and squalid death".
"As the bread basket of the continent where poverty is a real issue, no one will deny that immigration is an ongoing issue in South Africa, but this article is one-sided and not factual," said van der Hoven. "It is not true that Fifa have their doubts about South Africa hosting the 2010 World Cup and many of the issues the author is referring to have long since been resolved. It is typical of the misrepresentation Africa continues to endure in the international media."
Sunday Times Africa correspondent, Dan McDougall, writes that strikes by underpaid immigrant workers are causing work on the World Cup stadiums to "grind to a halt" and that Fifa has voiced fears "over the preparations for what will be the largest sporting event in Africa's history".
"One particular concern is the state of the power grid. Power cuts are still common in most main cities. There are concerns about the wider infrastructure. In Johannesburg, street and traffic lights do not work in large parts of the city and routine maintenance has all but ceased," he writes.
Van der Hoven asked: "Has Mr McDougall even visited Johannesburg? Where does he get his facts?"
Van der Hoven's company, Southern Africa Direct, broadcasts positive and informative content on southern Africa on TV in the UK and worldwide on the internet.
"We have to show South Africa in a positive light, through articles, videos and TV productions. We have to tell our stories ourselves - because no one else is going to."
Judging by users' comments, misperceptions about Africa still abound.
"It is clear that some are just not capable of self-governance especially in Africa," commented Frank of Los Angeles; "Why is anyone surprised by all this!" wrote PR of Manchester; and "I think this is one world cup I'll give a miss," wrote Peter K of Vancouver. - Daily News Foreign Service
Starvation kills hopes of South Africa's rubbish-tip refugees ...
From The Sunday Times July 12, 2009
Incomers hoping for opportunities from the 2010 football World Cup are instead finding xenophobia, poverty, poor wages and squalid death
Beneath the granite shadow of South Africa’s Quadu Mountains, the prayers for the dead infant are spoken in Shona, the language of rural Zimbabwe.
It is early morning. Across the De Doorns township, an hour's drive east of the commercial heart of Cape Town, migrant labourers emerge from twisted tin shacks, forced awake by the sound of mourning drifting across the main highway north to Johannesburg.
By the roadside cemetery a dozen women sing and shiver in the midwinter chill beneath a circling flock of starlings: “We will meet again in Heaven, through the blood of Jesus, we will meet.”
At their stamping feet, on a mound of rocky earth, sits the tiny coffin of thin cream-coloured plywood.
Inside lies the body of one-year-old Melissa Mauketo, emaciated and withered, a victim of malnutrition in a country that has become a false beacon of hope for Africa’s dispossessed.
The corner of the burial ground we are standing in betrays a wider tragedy. Around us are crude immigrant graves adorned with simple white crosses.
On each crucifix, the knife-carved names of other infants, the diseased and malnourished children of immigrants from Lesotho, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia. All of Africa in the ground beneath us.
The girl’s middle name was Nyaradzo. It means “comfort”, the dead child’s mother, Patience, tells me through her sobs. “We are a long way from home here, but Zimbabwe is still worse.”
As we leave the cemetery, Braam Hanekom, the founder of Passop, a campaigning charity that helps South Africa’s refugees, says that up to 1,000 illegal migrants are coming to the Western Cape every day, looking for work and a new start. “By the time the World Cup is upon us that figure will have increased dramatically,” he says.
“This situation here is unacceptable. A child’s death from malnutrition on the outskirts of Cape Town is astonishing and, with more immigrants coming in, it can only get worse.”
He adds: “Imagine the 2010 games as an enormous magnet for Africa’s uneducated and impoverished and then imagine how bad life will become for these immigrants who come here to these townships and camps with the hope of finding work but find only exploitation and xenophobia. The situation is much broader than the government recognises.
“What’s not being acknowledged is the fact that this isn’t a ‘male migrant’ issue. They are still summoning their families as soon as they arrive here, wives and children, when they can barely feed themselves, and these people are dying. The World Cup will be a tragedy for many African families.”
For all its poverty and historic divisions, South Africa remains, despite last summer’s xenophobic attacks, which left 70 foreign workers dead in a wave of antiimmigrant violence, a beacon of hope for the dispossessed and persecuted, with a constitution that in theory guarantees equality and a functioning economy that rewards entrepre-neurial effort.
With President Robert Mugabe’s continued destruction of Zimbabwe’s economy, hundreds of thousands of Zimbabweans, many of them well educated, still stream across the Limpopo river into South Africa, straining its resources.
Figures vary, but as many as 3m Zimbabweans may have made the cross-border journey under cover of darkness, one of the largest exoduses Africa has seen.
More recently they have been joined by immigrants from Somalia, Nigeria, Angola and Mozambique. Government sources now claim that there are at least 6m foreign nationals working illegally in South Africa, representing 14% of the population.
Melissa Mauketo’s story shows many immigrants are facing even deeper hardship. For South Africa’s illegal workers, underpayment, long working hours, poor living conditions and starvation are accepted parts of daily life.
Most suffer in silence for fear of losing their jobs or being deported.
The conditions are appalling - with only 20 rent-a-loos for 200/300 individuals and one water tap (the second one is broken)
Philani Zamuchiya, of the Institute for Poverty, Land and Agrarian Studies, a research centre at the University of the Western Cape, claims that already appalling conditions on farms are becoming worse for migrants, who will accept almost any job out of desperation.
He said that although minimum salaries should be £110 a month, most farmers were paying their workers a mere £20, which, “with their families, isn’t enough to feed themselves”.
Problems worsen during the five-month off season for work in the vineyards. Farm workers struggle to meet bare necessities, and infant mortality in the immigrant camps soars. “There is no food here, just like Zimbabwe,” says Anita Makauto, Melissa’s aunt. “Over there is a rubbish dump where Zimba-bwean and Congolese immigrants queue up every Friday to eat, waiting for the trucks to arrive to feed their families.
“I have been there for scraps, as have all of my family. I see women eat straight from the ground, rotten cabbage and potatoes, scraping fruit out of tins with their hands. The council has told us we must take the rotten food away from the dump and eat it out of sight of the police.”
She added: “The locals call us names and threaten to beat us. Every week fires are started in the compound where we live. We live in fear because we never know what will happen next. We are scared to talk in public for fear of people recognising our accents. On buses we mustn’t open our mouths. People here have seen the worst of South Africa but it is better they kill us here than we go back and they kill us in Zim.”
On the flatbed passenger lorries from De Doorns township to the vineyards where day labourers eke out a living, working-class South Africans, Zulu and Xhosa, talk loudly and threateningly about burying the foreigners who sit beside them, particularly the Zimbabweans and Lesothans, whom they accuse of stealing jobs by undercutting wages and working for as little as £1.20 a day. The air of violence and intimidation is palpable.
Although government ministers condemned last year’s attacks on foreign workers, they have since left it to civic groups to distribute aid and grants to the displaced. Some critics say the immigrants’ plight has fallen by the wayside, with the focus on the World Cup. Others say the government is paralysed by what a spokesman for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees recently called a “sense of shame” at the treatment of refugees.
Intermittent violence has continued against foreigners, particularly Somalis, many of whom are legal refugees and run shops in the townships. A Somali woman and her three children were recently stabbed and bludgeoned to death in Eastern Cape province, prompting the UN’s top human rights official, Navanethem Pillay, to condemn “a continued and dangerous pattern of targeted attacks on foreigners”.
“This was a hard place for my baby to be born,” says Lorian Mohakia, clutching her five-month-old son, Jacob, to her breast. Alongside her in the Bonne Esperance Refugee Shelter, in the Philippi district of Cape Town, are women from Zimbabwe, Angola, Burundi, Congo, Namibia and Senegal, all of them clutching undernourished infants.
Pregnant women and those with newborn babies are among the most vulnerable. Insufficient food, delayed ambulance services, lack of beds and illness continue to plague the lives of most immigrant women.
“I need to leave the shelter in the next few weeks,” she says. “I’ve seen other women leave to live on the street and lose their babies. People don’t believe that babies can die of starvation somewhere as beautiful as this.
“Immigrants like me don’t exist; we are unseen. Our children are born with no rights, no birth certificate and when they die nobody in South Africa hears their mother’s wails.”
Strike hits stadiums
The growing power of South Africa’s vast army of immigrant workers was displayed last week in a countrywide strike by almost 100,000 construction workers, many of them impoverished economic migrants from Lesotho and Zimbabwe.
The wildcat strike brought work on the World Cup stadiums to a grinding halt and placed further doubt on the nation’s readiness for next year’s event.
The stadiums are due to be completed by December and work was reportedly on schedule before the strike. Yet concerns remain that at least five stadiums being built from scratch, including Cape Town’s showcase Green Point stadium, are still far from ready.
The strike came after workers demanded a 13% wage increase. They downed tools at midday on Wednesday, stopping work on many of the infrastructure projects the government is hoping will help pull the economy out of recession and prepare the country for the tournament.
Projects hit by the strike included the high-speed Gautrain rail link between Johannesburg and Pretoria, ports, airports and power stations and 10 stadium projects.
Many of the workers on the site of the Cape Town stadium say they are being paid less than £3 a day, a claim denied by the authorities. 
Striking construction workers protest in front of the Moses Mabhida stadium, under construction for the 2010 World Cup, in Durban July 10, 2009
South Africa’s National Union of Mineworkers, which has many members in the building trades, and the Building, Construction and Allied Workers Union confirmed last night that a framework for a deal had been reached and the strike would end next week.
Fears have been voiced within Fifa, football’s governing body, over the preparations for what will be the largest sporting event in Africa’s history. One particular concern is the state of the power grid. Power cuts are still common in most main cities.
There are concerns about the wider infrastructure. In Johannesburg, street and traffic lights do not work in large parts of the city and routine maintenance has all but ceased.
Public transport in Cape Town and Johannesburg is virtually nonexistent and in Durban, another host city, the roads are unable to cope with the volume of traffic.
There are mounting fears about security in a country with some of the world’s highest crime rates. In Cape Town a zero-tolerance police initiative aims to cut petty crime in the city in the run-up to the opening match in June. But it will do nothing to curb violence in the surrounding townships or street robberies in Johannesburg, which will host the final.
Source:- http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/africa/article6689725.ece
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