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- A Stuijt
- Retired South African medical journalist, ex-Sunday Times of Johannesburg.
Downtown Johannesburg becomes a Potemkin fake
01:28 | 
Posted by
A Stuijt |
September 22 2009 – By Adriana Stuijt. AMSTERDAM, The Netherlands. A dismal picture of downtown Johannesburg was painted in a TV programme on NOVA TV2 last night, entitled , "Surviving in Johannesburg", on the NOVA-TV2 programme.
It showed very clearly that some of the most important matches of the FIFA World Cup 2010 football tournaments are going to be held in the most violently-criminal city in the world – Johannesburg.
The report was produced by Dutch journalist Rob Schröder, who has 'gone back and forth since January 2008" to record the changes in life in Johannesburg, which is facing a high level of crime due to the huge influx of millions of illegal immigrants from other African countries.
Local authorities now are trying to ‘sweep the streets clean’ in time for the two weeks duration of the FIFA World Cup 2010 football tournaments.
"How is it possible to control this city full of hope and fear and to turn the inner city into a sustainable, safe environment?" Schröder asked – showing a desperate picture of the battle for survival waged by many tens of thousands of desperately poor, uneducated and chanceless Africans speaking hundreds of different languages, who have over the past 15 years arrived enmasse from the rest of the continent.
Claiming to be ‘asylum-seekers’ for the most part, these desperate Africans live iin the once so orderly streets of a now nearly derelict downtown Johannesburg and are seen stripping the vacated homes of working-class Afrikaner mining-families – described by historically-challenged journalists as ‘middleclass whites’ - but who fled the place more than a decade ago.
Sanitising downtown just chases off the poor… for a while:
Schröder also showed how the SA police are attempting to 'sweep the streets clean' of hundreds of thousands of homeless street urchants and ‘informal traders’ in time for the World Cup 2010 in June next year – basically they are trying hard to turn all of downtown Johannesburg into a Potemkin village, where a fake atmosphere of ‘happiness and prosperity’ they want to present, merely hides the continuing desperation and constant fear of famine hovering just behind the freshly-painted facades.
The film also shows the effect these police-actions are having on the migrants.
- Alas, the story soon sank into the usual left-wing rubbish showing the ‘rich street life of the poor,’ presenting addicts and vagrants in various cultural expressions such as rap and street music and incredibly filthy streets.
They did however also show the ruins which Johannesburg’s once finest buildings have been turned into – such as the Ponte building and the once so luxurious five-star Carlton Hotel, that icon of the collapse of a rich society which only 15 years ago, was the wealthiest on the continent. Developers with close links to the ANC-regime now are now attempting to clean all this up in time for the WC2010. They are filmed going bout the streets muttering sentences which include words such as ‘clean sweeps’ and ‘crowd control’ and even send small groups of pro-WC2010 campaigners, blowing their dreadful plastic vuvuzelas, to be filmed by the TV cameras of the Dutch film-makers. It’s an open question whether the authorities will be able to maintain this fake-prosperity front in downtown CBDs like Johannesburg, once the tourists have all gone home and Africa’s millions of desperate migrants will be able to return again, unhindered by police sweeps and cleansing brigades with white-wash paint buckets and brooms. http://www.nederland2.nl/uitzendinggemist/
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