5,12,2010,394

Get this: most of the people who attended Sunday’s Indaba Media Face Off (these are media people, remember, jaded old, craggy old, cynical old journalists, mostly, the okes who’ve seen it all) - most of the people who attended Sunday’s Indaba Media Face Off believe South Africa is going to have a successful World Cup in 2010.

Well duh-uh. We did it for cricket (with years of notice), we did it for rugby (with years of notice), we did it for the IPL (with ye… I mean about a month’s notice). So why shouldn’t we do it for football?

Back to the Western Cape’s 2007 Access the Destination Workshop and Conrad Mayer, the president of the Bavarian Hospitality and Restaurant Association, about whom I spoke on Sunday: “A thousand days before the kick-off, South Africa is further along the road than we were in Germany a thousand days before our own World Cup.”

See? Afri-ficiency.

And now back to the Media Face Off, which was moderated by CNN’s Richard Quest (without a doubt one of the most entertaining moderators you’re ever likely to hear, and I guess it doesn’t hurt his audiences that he’s tall dark and handsome. OK, maybe not dark, but you know what I mean).  What was surprising about the Media Face Off was that many of us were groaning at some points the speakers made - and even laughing at others.

We’ve heard it all before. We’ve all been to these elephant-bumping contests (a term coined by Warren Buffet to describe jamborees and cocktail functions at which he’s required to meet and listen to Big Players). We’ve all seen the emotion-rousing, ear-drum-busting ads and watched the PowerPoint presentations.

But when friend Jacques Maritz, a media person to the core and one of the grognards* of the industry, asked Mr. Quest to ask by a show of hands how many people in the room (there were about 350 of us) thought we were going to have successful World Cup in 2010 - only one person chose not to vote (but she may not have heard the question and might have put her hand up because of a call of nature) and as many as 80 or even 90% of us said “Yes!”

And that kinda sums up this year’s Indaba for me: it’s been a show of hands for the future of South Africa.

* I promised Ben Rootman, Martin van Niekerk and the team at Junxion Communications, who produce Indaba Daily News, that I would use this wonderful word once more - just so that I can explain it. Grongard means ‘grumbler,’ and not necessarily in a derogatory way. It’s also a term used in on-line gaming to describe the grey-beards of the genre, and it comes from the name for an old hand in the Napoleonic Armies. Pronounce it in French - grrronyard, and you’ll have a Great Tourism Week!