It seems like a million years ago even though kickoff was just four weeks back. The FIFA World Cup 2010 circus has rolled into and out of town and South Africa has shown, again, that we are capable of delivering even the biggest of spectaculars. The naysayers, the doom-mongers, the predictors of violence and anarchy, the weathermen who predicted seismic carnage...sorry chaps. All wrong.

In a meeting with the CEO of one of the country's top ICT companies just after the World Cup, the gentleman in question - who does a good bit of business with government - pointed out that perhaps above all, this World Cup has shown what government can do. He noted that given the right sort of inducement, there is no reason why we should have the rampant crime problem. He observed that the massive problems we face in education, in healthcare, can surely be solved more effectively when political nonsense is dropped in favour of a definite goal. There is a pun in that.

And I think he is right. Government, it seems, spends far too much time kicking political footballs around rather than focusing on service delivery. The resulting paralysis means nothing gets done and also that everything has to get to a state of collapse before meaningful interventions take place.

But when there are definite deadlines and when the reputation of the country depends upon it, the politicos have shown that they can do it. They can even do it well, which is unfortunately more than we have come to expect from them in almost every other respect.

As citizens, we now know what our leaders are capable of. We have to keep them sharp; in South Africa, paying your taxes is not enough to achieve that. We have to spend time in Community Policing meetings, we have to agitate by reading newspapers and online websites, we have to participate perhaps more than in any other country, in the day to day administration of our country. We have to get involved and stay involved.

So that our country can be as successful as the World Cup was.