JOHANNESBURG LETTER:Part of the growing-up stage of any country is that it has to be let make its own mistakes

HOME TONIGHT on a late flight which comes through Amsterdam and is likely to be stuffed with morose Dutch people keen to get back to their Amsterdam coffeehouses.

Before the toil of the airport and journey, however, Phineas, who has been driving me around Johannesburg – or Jozi, as he calls it – has half-offered, half-insisted on taking me on an informal freedom tour of Soweto. He is going to show me the sights.

Where the young Mandela lived and hung his shingle, the spot where young Hector Pieterson was shot at the start of the 1976 riots, and so on. If I’m lucky and if Phineas can stop laughing for long enough (Phineas, it’s not Funnyus), we will also see the house in which Leeds United legend Lucas Radebe grew up.

It’s a funny thing and sad thing, but Phineas knows as much about the hardships of Leeds United as he knows about what goes on at the Orlando Pirates or Kaizer Chiefs, the dominant Sowetan clubs. A large part of soccer’s progress in some African countries has been a further colonisation of the imagination by the English Premiership. In Johannesburg and beyond you see many, many more Premiership jerseys being worn than you do favours of local clubs.

Phineas lives in Soweto with his three kids, the oldest of whom he is struggling to put through college. He talks almost sentimentally about the struggle for South Africa’s independence and wonders wistfully if the Bikos and the Mandelas really had in mind the sort of administration which Jacob Zuma presides over these days.

It’s a good question. But part of the growing-up stage of any country is that it has to be let make its own mistakes and endure its own Zumas as well as enjoy its Madibas.

Today and yesterday Phineas has been busy ferrying people to the airport and he is more than a little disappointed in the amount of business which the World Cup brought to his country and in the speed at which it has dissipated. I imagine that sense of disillusion will fester and grow in some people, but the hope for South Africa will be that they will eventually take the white elephant stadiums in their stride, enjoy the improved infrastructure and move on with the galvanised and confident feeling which South Africa has had these past few weeks.

Perhaps the pretty stadium in Green Point will hardly be filled again, and for some it will be hard not to look at it and imagine the hospitals or schools which it might have bought. But the compensation lies in South Africa’s seamless staging of the event and the longing which many of us have to go back and to learn more about this recondite place.

What is as interesting as the economic or political impact the tournament will prove to have is what it will do for football here. Spain’s win in the 19th staging of the World Cup was the 10th for a European side. South America have won the other nine.

I am indebted to a thoughtful article by Samuel Amiteye, a Ghanaian academic working in Germany, for pointing out some of the following details which are pertinent to African soccer. All 19 of those World Cups have been won by sides with native coaches.

Part of the deficit of confidence in African countries and the surfeit of arrogance among the rest of us has meant it is almost traditional now for African countries to set sail under the guidance of foreign managers. The cliche is that you need a foreign manager to impose the discipline and the stifling systems which native managers would struggle with. Long term, it is a poor investment.

Twenty teams in the recently deceased tournament had native coaches. Of the six African nations who qualified, Algeria were the only team to travel with a native coach. Twelve native and four foreign coaches advanced to the last 16, from which six native and two foreign coaches qualified to the quarter-finals. Eight foreign coaches failed to bring their sides to the last 16. Four of those were managing African sides. The four teams that made the semi-finals had native coaches.

Amiteye points out, however, that Ghana have won the African Cup of Nations four times (1963, 1965, 1978 and 1982) and were coached each time by a Ghanaian. On top of that, they have two under-17 world titles and have been twice under-17 runners-up. Ghana are one of the favourites in this age group at the Fifa World Championship. Only the first of these achievements, the Under-17 World Championship in Italy in 1991, came under a foreign coach (Otto Pfister). Ghana won bronze at the Barcelona Olympics under a home-bred coach. Their Under-20 World Championship (another first for Africa) last year was achieved under Sellas Tetteh, another home product.

So why the heavy investment in foreign coaches for the national team, men who add the trip to the World Cup to their CVs and immediately sell themselves to the highest bidder when the World Cup is over? When they go, they take with them the nation’s entire store of knowledge on how to manage and handle a team at a World Cup.

It is a pity and a tragedy. Soccer is a great unifying river which runs through the African continent. A lot of times we glibly say that sport or soccer is a metaphor for life, but in Africa they tend to find that those countries which have sorted themselves out well economically and politically in terms of corruption tend to do best at football.

Ghana again is a good example, though I enjoyed the story of the climax to the 2007 season when Nania FC and Great Mariners were involved in a tight race for promotion and both absolutely needed to win on the last day of the season. Nania beat Okwaku 31-0 and Mariners beat Mighty Jets 28-0. All four clubs and anybody even sitting on the bench were banned!

Nania FC and the Mariners not withstanding, Ghana’s success here has been a tribute to patient under-age work at home and a league which is generally well run. They are ahead of the posse at the moment and can learn lessons from countries like Nigeria, whose burgeoning promise in the 1990s has been squandered by corrupt administrators.

South Africa was great. The legacy will be mixed, but perhaps confidence will be the most tangible asset the continent brings forward. Their day will come.