Sports minister Gayton McKenzie. Picture: Anton Geyser/Gallo Images
Newly appointed sports minister Gayton McKenzie is making all sorts of promises, but if he wants to follow through, he’s going to need to search for money. And he’ll need to find lots of it.
McKenzie has been on a roll on social media, but the ‘problems’ he’s claiming he can fix are issues that sports fans have been raising for years, and there are reasons they haven’t been resolved.
Firstly, the Minister of Sport, Arts and Culture says he’s going to “declare war” on SuperSport if the broadcaster doesn’t allow the SABC to show live sports matches contested by national teams.
But the reason the SABC doesn’t already have the rights to international sport is that it can’t afford it.
SuperSport pays a small fortune for rights, and it’s ludicrous to suggest the broadcaster should just give a competitor a share of those rights. It’s not SuperSport’s fault, or its problem, that SABC can’t afford to ensure most South Africans can watch the national teams when they play.
It’s also not reasonable to demand that national federations sell rights for less, in order to allow the SABC to afford them, because the money from those rights is used by the various federations to run their codes. Without that funding, professional sport in this country will come to a grinding halt.
Secondly, McKenzie says his term at the helm of the Department of Sport and Recreation will be a “failure” if the F1 World Championship doesn’t return to South Africa.
However, people have tried to bring an F1 race back to Kyalami, but the fee to host a race is more than R400 million, and this is before organisational costs (around R1 billion) are even taken into account.
On top of this, the Kyalami track reportedly needs to be upgraded to meet international requirements.
The reality is that the government cannot afford that, and corporate sponsors haven’t been willing to commit that sort of money.
So the only solution to the ‘problems’ McKenzie wants to fix is finding billions of rand.
Not that it’s impossible, but there are good reasons these things haven’t already happened. The solutions are not as simple as he might think.
