And after the World Cup?

"What recovery?" asks Ms Gugu Rambau, an advertising executive. "This year is even harder. I want to get out of debt but I'm forced to dip into my credit card again and again for basics."

Leading economists say that South Africa, currently underperforming its potential with around three per cent growth, needs to at least double that to address its economic misery and avoid it spilling into serious social unrest.

Millions without jobs -- officially one-in-four of the population , unofficially it may be as high as 40 per cent. A better standard of living eludes most of South Africa's 50 million people since the fall of apartheid in 1994. Social protests have highlighted frustrations at living with poverty 16 years into democracy and the chronically high unemployment rate will stoke further unrest. Job-seeking South Africans by the thousands signed on for short-term stints as World Cup security guards — only to go on strike early in the tournament and lose those jobs in a bitter dispute over low wages. According to UBS Investment Research, the 2010 World Cup has created more than 330,000 jobs. But many of those were temporary and low-paid, such as the short-lived jobs for the striking security stewards at World Cup stadiums. The strikers said they were offered half the pay they were initially promised — 190 rand ($25) or less for shifts of 12 hours or more."We want to put it in our memory that we enjoyed the World Cup, but we need to eat," said striker Denis Manganye.

In Durban,community organizer Desmond D'Sa said "...people must be so desperate, knowing they're going up against the national mood and a very tough police force. They risk being depicted as the spoilsports of the World Cup because they've had it up to here." D'Sa said the strikers shared a common plight with many other South Africans hired for World Cup jobs — in effect, they were hired as freelance, temporary workers rather than having a formal contract."The spread of a system of casualization has made workers very vulnerable," he said.

Windfall from the World Cup tournament has been an empty dream for fishermen, street traders, souvenir and clothing manufacturers.Many were angered at the contracts for World Cup merchandise that went to manufacturers abroad; even the toy versions of the tournament mascot, Zakumi, were produced for a while in China to the wrath of South African labor activists. Many traders had hoped for a bonanza catering to World Cup spectators but are being barred from FIFA-enforced "exclusion zones" around the stadiums — which are, for the most part, reserved for official sponsors like McDonalds, Coca-Cola and Budweiser. Many vendors and subsistence fishermen have been evicted from a pier and beachfront area that has been redeveloped for the World Cup.

"You are going to get more hungry people and hungry people become angry people so one can expect social demonstrations to persist" said Ian Cruickshanks, head of treasury strategic research at Nedbank.

Immigrants from even poorer parts of Africa are already worried after threats to drive them out when the soccer World Cup tournament ends in July. Riots against foreign nationals killed 62 people two years ago and displaced more than 100,000.

Outside a bar in northern Johannesburg, a man was angry. "I don't know what the people living in shacks thought: that their lives were going to get better because of a soccer team."

Patrick Craven, the spokesman for the Congress of South African Trade Unions, said "South Africa has all sorts of problems. They started long before the World Cup and will continue long afterward."