World Cup: South African officials pushing beggars out of Cape Town, activists say

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In an apparent effort to make visitors feel more welcome, South African authorities have been removing beggars and homeless people from areas where World Cup tourists are likely to go, civil-rights groups have charged.

Over the last six months, hundreds of poor families have been removed from downtown Cape Town and the surrounding area and relocated to a shantytown 10 miles away, activists told reporters from Bloomberg. And in Johannesburg, dozens of blind beggars have been arrested and told to leave the streets.

‘As we’ve got closer to the World Cup, we’ve had increasing reports that people are being removed,’ Selvan Chetty, deputy director of the Solidarity Peace Trust, told Bloomberg reporters. ‘In order to impress our foreign visitors, we tend to try and hide the poor people on our streets, even if it is a fact of life.’ Officials in both cities dispute the charges.

‘Nobody is being moved against their will,’ Kylie Hatton, a spokeswoman for the city of Cape Town said. ‘There is no policy to remove people from the city streets as a clean-up campaign for the World Cup.’

-- Kevin Baxter, in Johannesburg, South Africa