Fred Bridgland: After World Cup 'honeymoon', nation returns to brutal, bloody normality

THE shooting dead of Rod Smart in a Johannesburg car-jacking – and the shooting in the same city on Monday of Farouk Seedat, chief financial officer of the 2010 Fifa World Cup Organising Committee – ends the extraordinary, violence-free, month-long "honeymoon" of the football tournament in South Africa.

A cataclysmic wave of violent crime that would besmirch South Africa's name, as predicted by many analysts, simply did not occur between the opening match and the final on 11 July. There was no wave, barely a ripple. The criminals put in a more indifferent showing than even the English and French football teams.

"With increased police activity everywhere, the criminals have been afraid to come out," boasted police spokesman Colonel Eugene Opperman, who conceded the country's lawbreakers might have taken time out to watch the dozens of matches.

Dr Smart's appalling murder, together with sundry other shootings and killings, marks a resumption of "normal service", as South Africans retreat once more behind the electric fences that protect their homes against murderous robbers in a country where crime, despite the World Cup respite, remains virtually out of control. Laser beams criss-cross gardens. Most families keep ferocious dogs, and yesterday a man died in Cape Town when his three pit bulls turned on him.

In the days before the World Cup began, a friend of mine was shot five times in his Johannesburg house. Another friend was hijacked with a gun to her head and taken to Soweto to use her card to empty her bank accounts. Another friend gave car-jackers his keys, but they nevertheless slashed his face with broken bottles into the pattern of the London Underground and he died of a heart attack. All this was almost routine, and so the violence-free tournament came as a surprise.

"Those who said criminals would ruin the World Cup are eating humble pie now," said National Prosecuting Authority spokesman Mthunzi Mhaga.

He is surely giving thanks Dr Smart's murder did not happen a few weeks earlier: the consequences would have been great. .