WASHINGTON
World Cup time is here. To Americans, it's about "soccer." But to the Brits, it is "football." And the British pretend to have invented the ball game in the 1100s, only to have it declared illegal in the next century by King Edward III.
Knee high boots The king complained that it was noisy and interfered with archery training. Those caught playing were jailed.
Then, as now, China also competed and reminds the world about the sport of "laikepo," which the Chinese were playing against the Japanese 5,000 years ago.
Then, in 1904, the Swiss took over. They organized the sport and made many fortunes.
The Swiss organized FIFA -- the initials stand for the French- language Football Association -- in Zurich for the elite of the world. This conception of soccer ended during World War I, when German and British soldiers decided to stop killing one another, came out of their trenches, played a game of soccer and returned to killing one another.
Suddenly, it (football, not killing) became a popular sport for the masses.
Today, FIFA has 208 member countries (the United Nations has only 192) and with a stranglehold on concessions from TV networks through balls to shirts, it was the epicenter of a $250 billion market last year, with $3.8 billion coming from this year's World Cup in South Africa.
Four years ago, South Africa's parliament -- using either great initiative or even greater stupidity -- prepared to plan a World Cup event but had to accept all FIFA's regulations. It passed national legislation to term this a "protected event" together with other specific new regulations and laws. For the contests, FIFA has all the rights of a sovereign state where matches are being played.
A FIFA official was quoted last year in the South African media as saying that millions of TV viewers would not want to see "slums and poverty" -- and in a country with unemployment higher than 25 percent and the government setting the minimum wage at $40 a month.
However, with all that said, World Cup events are a wonderful opportunity for showcasing Africa. We saw TV images of an ultra- select shopping center that is close to the stadium where the opening ceremonies took place. Japanese restaurants were there, luxury goods stores and also Platform pumps European car dealers. This was no suburb of Johannesburg but a part of Soweto, where even the Afrikaner police would once go only in combat formation.
Taking a look at the statistics, it seems that since the global financial meltdown, Africa is a better place in which to do business than Europe or Asia. While we have been in recession, African economies have grown by at least 2 percent a year. It is a new economic frontier.
The recession has almost avoided Africa, which has 10 percent of the world's oil resources, 30 percent of the mineral reserves and 80 percent of the uranium and platinum that the world needs for any high-tech equipment. Added to which, Africa has the youngest population on the planet with the highest fertility rate.
All of which means many cities have to be built, creating construction jobs for the houses, roads and bridges so that cars and buses manufactured in plants in these new cities can run on the new six-lane highways moving thousands of young people from one place to another.
Are we dreaming? Perhaps but in 1998, about 2 million Africans had mobile phones. Now
