Ambitious plans to revive the Randfontein Golf Club to its former glory have been halted due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
The club has been closed for golfers since 1 April last year and the plan was to reopen it early in 2021. The only facilities that are open are the ones for events.
According to Bizzah Matsobane, general manager of the Randfontein Golf Club, there has been some major setbacks due to the pandemic, with investors pulling out being one of the major challenges.
They had hoped that by this time, they would be up and running, and that there would be a lot of activity at the club, but unfortunately that is not the case.
“The golf club definitely will not be open to players this year.” Matsobane explained that the greens needed extensive rehabilitation, adding that if they start working on the greens now, they would only be ready next year.
The pandemic has really disrupted every aspect of our lives, and when you run a business, bad things can happen. You just don’t know what to do because every business is facing some or other challenge to keep their doors open.
“Renovating and revamping almost entirely depend on investments. If nobody invests money in the club, it is going to be very difficult to get anything done in the foreseeable future. We have been thrown back light years. We now need to pick up the pieces and move forward,” he told the Herald.
They have met with possible investors, he added, but nobody has put pen to paper as yet.
“There were investments lined up in 2020, but the investors had second thoughts due to the pandemic.”
Another challenge facing the club management is the state of the grounds. On 19 January the Herald received photographs showing that the grass had not been cut and greens were dry.
Matsobane’s response was that the grass will be cut and the grounds will be tidied from the beginning of February onwards.
We are going to start putting our machines to work and we will begin to do something.”
Matsobane said despite having the equipment to do maintenance, it wasn’t done because little activity was allowed so they could not get people to work at the club. He said they needed to follow the regulations.
“We did not neglect it deliberately; we are going to get people to start doing something about it because we want to show people that there is still life at the club.”
He explained that if it wasn’t for Covid-19 he believed they would have done much of what they had planned.
The course has served the community in the past and it got neglected over time. It is still our vision to restore the course to the way people remember it.”
Matsobane admitted that the questions people were asking about the state of the golf course were legitimate, “… because they still have this place in their hearts. We need to give people hope that things will be like they were before, if not better, soon.”
