It’s just past midnight and, after enjoying a meal in Melville — one of the few Johannesburg neighbourhoods where you see black, white and Asian walking the streets together — I’m dropping off some friends at their serviced apartment in the suburb of Sandton.

Their place is a two-minute walk from Fifa headquarters in Nelson Mandela Square. They get out and disappear into the building, nodding to the security guards.

As I’m about to drive off, a sports utility vehicle (SUV) screeches into the driveway behind me, followed by a white sedan.

I can see the couple in the SUV. A white, thirtysomething blonde is in tears, the guy with her, who is also white, seems dazed. A man jumps out of the white sedan and runs angrily towards the SUV. He’s black and he’s jabbing his finger in the direction of the white man, who slowly gets out of the car. I can hear them arguing, but have no idea what they’re saying.

Then I notice the black man’s right hand go to his waist. He has a holster on his belt. And, yes, there’s a gun. The white guy takes a few steps back. At this point my curiosity is trumped by my sense of self-preservation. I speed off wondering what I have just witnessed.

My first thought is that the black man with the gun is some kind of car-jacker. For a second I hate myself for jumping to such a racially prejudiced conclusion. But then, what else are you supposed to think? What conclusion would you jump to if you saw a man with a gun get out of an unmarked car and chase after a well-heeled couple? Especially if the man is black, the couple are white and this is Johannesburg and you’ve had your head filled with the dangers and security precautions and the scaremongering ever since you booked your ticket for South Africa?

Then I remember that the gun was in a holster and that he was wearing smart slacks and an expensive-looking button-down shirt. Criminals don’t dress that way, do they? I tell myself that he was probably a plain-clothes cop driving an unmarked car who pulled somebody over for speeding and then got annoyed because they were uncooperative. A plausible explanation. But I just don’t know.

That’s the thing about South Africa and security. You just don’t know how to read people and situations. The electric security fences, the armed guards, the high walls . . . the air of menace takes some getting used to. You wonder whether this is everyday life for the locals. People such as the woman who offered to rent us her house during the World Cup next year.

“If you come home at night and it’s dark, you can call the security company and they’ll send an armed guard to escort you into the house,” she said. “It’s included in the price.”

Indeed, the threat of crime — rather than crime itself — may be the single biggest thing that visiting World Cup fans will need to grow accustomed to. Beyond that, the country is in fairly good shape, at least from a football perspective. There are problems, but they are mostly fixable. The stadiums — at least the four that hosted Confederations Cup matches — are more than adequate. Through a miracle of organisation and chutzpah, power and broadband needs have been addressed. There were problems selling tickets to a number of games, but that was down more to a silly pricing policy (which presumably will be fixed) than a lack of passion from fans.

Public transport is generally poor and, besides, most foreign tourists are told not to take buses or trains. So you rely on cars, which would be OK, if parking facilities or the park-and-ride shuttles were adequate. They’re not, but at least that can (largely) be fixed.

More difficult to sort out will be some of the highways linking cities. Roughly half the road between Johannesburg and Bloemfontein — South Africa’s fifth-largest city — consists of one lane in either direction. Most of it isn’t lit at night and there are only two towns along the way, which means that, if you’re driving the four hours back to Johannesburg after a match — as I was on Wednesday night — you’ll have a rough idea of what it’s like to go snorkelling in a sewer filled with squid ink. Oh, and if you do hire a car and need to get some petrol, forget about using credit cards. Unless you have some kind of South African debit card, you’ll have to pay cash.

Visa may be one of the World Cup sponsors, but it’s not as welcome as you might think. For that matter, you can’t book a surprisingly large chunk of the hotels and guest houses using your credit card, either: you’ll need to pay a deposit via bank transfer.

But these things can be sorted out in the next 11 months. The enthusiasm is there on the part of South Africans, as is the will to learn from this Confederations Cup. In some areas, they’re in better shape than was thought. In others, there’s work to do. In still others, we’ll just have to accept the situation: substandard roads, lack of public transport, the paranoia of crime and violence. But perhaps the last points are a small price to pay for giving Africa its first World Cup.