R1bn Tottenham Hotspur sponsorship: ‘Government must halt deal’ – Cosatu

The Congress of South African Trade Unions (Cosatu) has called on the government to halt its planned R1 billion sponsorship of English Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur.

“The latest media revelations that SA Tourism’s interim chief financial officer, Johan van der Walt, has been reported admitting to having a relationship with an agency that is involved in the proposed R1 billion football sponsorship on an English Premier League team needs to be investigated.”

“We call on government to halt this deal until such time that the involved parties can clarify themselves and provide more details on allegations of conflict of interest,” said Cosatu.

More than a third of the budget

Cosatu said, in a statement on Friday, that while it supported all efforts to revive the tourism sector, and the need to advertise South Africa around the world to encourage more tourists to visit our shores, it did not understand why SA Tourism had to spend more than a third of the budget allocated to promote the country’s tourism sector on one deal. 

“This is alarming in the absence of any factual evidence showing the return on investment for such a deal.

“This has been scorned by tourism and marketing experts as little more than a bail out by a struggling developing economy of a pampered English soccer team, whose impact on promoting tourism to South Africa has not been quantified,” the statement read.  

‘Wasteful expenditure’

According to Cosatu, the amount allocated is wasteful expenditure. The federation added that projections made by SA Tourism are not new but instead unreliable.

“Tourism’s importance is sometimes overplayed, it remains a largely low-wage sector that is vulnerable to adverse natural, geopolitical and global economic contingencies on which government has no control over. Covid-19, the 2015-18 drought in Western Cape, and terrorism threats have undermined tourism before, especially from Western Europe.”

“Too much emphasis is placed on these service and primary sectors, but this is not transformative in terms of the neo-colonial structure of neither the economy nor its location in the international division of labour.”

NOW READ: R1bn Spurs deal: Tourism expert says sponsorship will benefit SA but DA says it’s ‘lunacy’

Controversy

Cosatu says that the ‘controversial’ deal shines the spotlight on the fact that many senior and strategic positions at SA Tourism are occupied by people who are acting and not permanently employed.

Cosatu added that it has been consistently arguing against interim chief executive appointments in the SOEs and state agencies because it created instability of management and leadership, and ultimately undermines stakeholder confidence.

“This needs to be rectified as soon as possible because it’s not sensible to entrust important decisions to people who pay no price for being wrong.

“The government needs to urgently attend to the list of concerns and irritations being raised by social partners and stakeholders. This saga calls for political leadership to tame and chaperon the self-righteousness, absence of sound fiscal moderation and misdirected idealism of SA tourism.” 

READ MORE: SA Tourism defends R1bn Spurs sponsorship, says it can get R88bn back