South Africa Tourism (SAT) acting CEO Themba Khumalo says the agency is not there to resolve the country's energy crisis or fix its potholes, its sole mandate is to attract tourists, and that is the reason for its proposed sponsorship of Tottenham Hotspur.
Khumalo delivered an at times impassioned — he apologised for his intensity at one stage — defence of SAT's proposed partnership with the English Premier League (EPL) team in a press conference in Sandton on Thursday. He said the deal is on hold after the plan emerged through a leak of a PowerPoint presentation in a report in Daily Maverick on Wednesday, but SAT are determined to press ahead with it.
News of the proposed deal, which would cost SAT, an agency that falls under the department of tourism, £42.5m (R910m) over three years, has sparked controversy and anger as load-shedding escalates and infrastructure crumbles.
“According to the Tourism Act 3 of 2014 the mandate of SAT is to market South Africa as a tourist destination domestically and internationally,” Khumalo said.
“We have 24 markets around the world we focus on. ... For the past 20 years money has been spent on foreign soil — whether spent on a single initiative, as was being envisaged now, on small campaigns with different travel agents and pockets of audiences — to persuade foreign nationals to travel in SA.”
Khumalo confirmed reported figures that the almost billion-rand Spurs deal, at R300m a year, would represent about “34 or 35%” of SAT’s budget.
He said SA Tourism’s media investment internationally had been a rolling average R950m for the three years from 2015 to 2017 and R1.2bn from 2017 to 2019.
He said the Spurs deal was aimed at achieving an inflection point in tourism growth to meet the mandate set by President Cyril Ramaphosa of 21-million visitors by 2030, which requires the current 13% growth to increase to 18%.
“Pre-Covid tourism contributed 6.4% to the GDP. Through Covid, the riots [of July 2021] and the floods [in KwaZulu-Natal in April 2022] that contribution has dropped to 3.2%. We have got to return to 2019 levels to get back to 6.4% and beyond — I believe tourism can contribute 10% to the economy.”
Khumalo said South Africa's recovery post-Covid-19 is at 60% and the global average at 73%.
“What we are doing is aggregating all the small projects you’ve never heard of into a high-impact initiative for us to get the yield and inflection point in our trajectory.
“The money invested into tourism is not the same money that’s required for energy or potholes. There are other departments given that mandate.
“Our legislative mandate is about persuading international people to come into the country and spend money in our economy, and that is what we will stick to, whether through this initiative or any other initiative.
“Saying we should take this money and invest it into local football, again, is to suggest tourism must reach across to the domain of the sports, arts and culture department, and we are not going to do that — we are in the tourism business.
“This is a platform that gives us an aggregated audience. It’s not the only platform. There are also sales and media aggregators, events and TV shows around the world we’re going to go into.
“What you certainly don’t do is random. There are aggregators of databases around the world.
“You’ve got to find platforms that aggregate convertible databases for you to market directly so you know the people you are targeting are aware of your destination, have got the money to travel long-haul and have got the willingness to do a long-haul trip.”
Khumalo said the biggest aggregators include global media outlets such as “CNN or the BBC”.
“The second-biggest aggregators of audience are sport and entertainment. People on a weekend are glued to their TVs watching the EPL.
“[Companies or countries] will pay money to access you [the viewer] to buy their product or travel to their countries.”
Third is search engines, “such as Travelstart, Expedia”.
“This deal is not in isolation of all the others. It is in conjunction with them.
“So the envisaged deal has got absolutely nothing to do with football. It’s got to do with accessing the aggregated audiences football brings — that’s who we’re after.”
Khumalo said SAT's criteria on which international platforms to choose include global reach, if they can mirror all 24 markets, be sustained across the year and have an audience that can afford to travel.
“If you’re going to place an advert on CNN through the year, we don’t have that kind of money.”
He said awareness of SA in global tourism markets is weak.
“If you’re going to fix an awareness issue either you’ve go to throw a lot of media money at it, or you’ve got to have the kind of personality that commands attention, do something noteworthy. When we do a deal of this scale, it captures the attention of the world.”
Khumalo said the reach of the Spurs deal would be 661-million people globally “who watch the game live”, whom SA Tourism’s research showed are “affluent, can afford to travel and have high propensity to travel”.
“If you only converted one percent that is still 6-million new arrivals.”
