Durban’s Olympic bid faces questions over cost, corruption and accountability

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JEREMY MAGGS: Durban, you might have seen, wants to host the Olympic Games in 2036 or even 2040, potentially bringing the world’s biggest sporting event to Africa for the first time. But there is an uncomfortable contradiction. The city, as you well know, is dealing with violent anti-immigration protests, murder, looting and serious questions about public safety.

In that respect, I want to talk to Professor Brij Maharaj from the University of KwaZulu-Natal. He’s a professor of geography, and he specialises in urban governance and local economic development. A very simple question, Professor, and welcome to you, can a city struggling to maintain law and order seriously contemplate hosting the Games?

BRIJ MAHARAJ: It’s a key question, Jeremy. The debate about Durban hosting either 2036 or 2040, the Olympic Games, is not simply about sport. It’s fundamentally about urban priorities, public accountability, safety and security, social justice and the distribution of cost and benefits.

I think the Olympic bid must be evaluated against a very simple and important question: who gains, who loses, and who is left behind?

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JEREMY MAGGS: Who do you think would gain most from an exercise like this?

BRIJ MAHARAJ: Well, we can learn from the Fifa (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) experience, the 2010 Fifa World Cup, which I think many of us have forgotten. Fifa 2010 was promoted as a catalyst for economic growth and urban renewal. And yes, we did benefit from international showcasing and so on, but we’re forgetting that we have previously hosted successful Rugby World Cups and Cricket World Cups. So we’ve got experience and we got exposure and so on.

The people who benefit are actually the property developers, construction companies. We’ve built stadiums that are basically empty. I think five stadiums are totally underutilised. Moses Mabhida would be one of those stadiums. They call it an iconic landmark, but the cost of maintaining it is phenomenal, and it’s dipping into the public purse. So there is a lesson about building world-class infrastructure. That’s one thing, and deriving sustainable public value from it after.

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I like to put this on because I’ve been actively involved in this issue. In preparation, in the build-up for Fifa 2010, Durban authorities at that time attempted to destroy what is called the historic and iconic Warwick market, which is catering for poor people, and to replace it with a mall. One of the key issues with these mega events, and we can talk about Rio and so on, they had the Olympics in 2016, is displacement of poor people.

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JEREMY MAGGS: Which leads me to the next question and one that would naturally need to be asked about whether the money, and we are talking about an enormous sum of money here, be better spent on fixing water, sanitation, transport and other basic services. Surely, Professor, it’s a question of absolute prioritisation.

BRIJ MAHARAJ: Yeah, I think the city’s financial situation is a critical consideration. As you mentioned, eThekwini continues to grapple with severe infrastructure challenges, collapse of roads, water disruptions. They have not really fixed up what happened after the 2022 floods. So that’s a critical question, and what’s missing is the C word: corruption.

JEREMY MAGGS: But there’s a flip side to that argument is that it could, if done successfully, openly and transparently, transform the local economy. Is there credible evidence, do you think, that that might be a factor to consider?

BRIJ MAHARAJ: Listen, to be objective, they can accelerate infrastructure spending that would occur anyway. But this raises a more critical question: would these investments be made for local residents without the Olympics? Assuming there is no Olympic bid, will we do the same, engage in the same expenditure? And would this expenditure be designed around community needs rather than the event requirements?

The global experience, whether one looks at the 2004 Athens Olympic Games left the city and the country in public debt and several underutilised venues.

For the 2016 Games, Rio built many facilities and 10 years down the road, half of them are actually collapsing. So the people who suffer because of the inappropriate allocation of priority public expenditure are the poor.

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I’ll make one other point. Your listeners may recall the Durban bid for the Commonwealth Games in 2015, and we were successful. I’ve written an academic and a popular article which can be downloaded that the Durban Commonwealth bid for 2022 was won and lost by default. So we won the bid because the other cities withdrew and the last city that we were competing against was Edmonton in Canada, and they were having a serious financial crisis and they pulled out. So we got it by default.

Once we got the Commonwealth Games, the big issue was how are we going to underwrite the expenditure? For several months, the Commonwealth Games Association was engaging with the authorities, the city and the government and so on. If I recall correctly, the rough expenditure if we went ahead would have been around R14 billion.

So in the end we withdrew from that bid and we gave up. The Commonwealth Games actually decided that Durban couldn’t host it because we didn’t sign those guarantees that they wanted and it went to Birmingham.

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JEREMY MAGGS: The reality is that given that this bid proposal is 10 years down the line, we’re talking 2036 or even 2040. Professor, we simply have no idea how much this is going to cost the city of Durban. So would you suggest that it’s almost negligent to be pursuing a dream like this?

BRIJ MAHARAJ: I think the question arises, who made the decision? The key issue is democratic participation. Across the world, we are seeing many Olympic bids where they have encountered strong opposition from residents, where they were forced to withdraw.

The examples that I’m recalling are Calgary, Boston, Hamburg and Budapest in the past 10 or 15 years.

So there’s a lot of resistance and citizens are asking very serious questions about the anticipated benefits and the projected cost, which we simply don’t know.

I think there should be far more comprehensive public consultation, independent economic assessments and, most importantly, transparent disclosure of projected risk and cost. I think we as citizens deserve to know exactly how much public money may be committed and what are the trade-offs involved.

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JEREMY MAGGS: Just a final question and maybe a cynical one, but with Wednesday’s local government elections just around the corner, I guess we should be suspicious of politicians making grand international promises, right?

BRIJ MAHARAJ: Oh, definitely. I could say that Durban lacks the moral and ethical fibre, and the organisational and administrative integrity and capacity to host the Games.

JEREMY MAGGS: I’m going to leave it there with my thanks. That is Professor Brij Maharaj from the University of KwaZulu-Natal.