Your questions answered? I doubt it.

Much wailing and gnashing of teeth on social media this week, as it was revealed that SA Tourism – the body charged with promoting and marketing South Africa to the rest of the world as a tourist destination – is/was/are/might be planning to spend close to R1 billion on sponsoring Tottenham Hotspur FC.

“How can you be spending this money when our country is in such a state?”
“Why not spend this money on fixing Eskom?”
“Why must it be a foreign football team? We have plenty of our own who need that money!”

Now, I’m not an expert on marketing – unlike all of the experts on Twitter – but I do understand the basics: namely that you spend some money on telling people about a product or service that you offer, with the intent that enough of those people then buy that product or service to make more money than you spent on telling them about the product or service.

So in this case, a billion Rands outlay with the intention that sponsoring Spurs will bring in more than a billion Rands in tourist revenue.

And I think that rough outline kind of answers the first question above. The plan is to spend some money in order to make more money, and that more money will benefit the country more.

And as the second question points out, the country needs to be fixed. Ignoring the point above, in which we would get more money back (and more), how much would that R1 billion help to fix Eskom and get rid of our loadshedding once and for all? Figures as to how much Eskom needs to work properly again do vary, but this number came up more than once:

This R1 billion amounts to less than 0.1% of that. I’m not saying it’s not a lot of money – it is – but I am saying that giving it to Eskom won’t make any difference whatsoever to loadshedding.
Nothing. Nada. Zippo. Dololo.
You will be urinating it away into the strong southeaster, which is turning our inefficient wind turbines

It wouldn’t even pay off 2% of the R52 billion that Eskom is owed just by South African municipalities.

Oh, and why not sponsor a local football team? Because close to no-one watches South Africa football. Not at the stadiums, not on the TV. You need people to see your marketing message, or it won’t work. And then those people who do watch South African football are South Africans, so they know all about South Africa, but they have no money to spend on coming to South Africa.

I guess my problem with the way this story was broken was twofold.

Firstly, that tourism is South Africa is one of our very few recent success stories. And whatever SA Tourism has been doing to get things going again after the disastrous pandemic seems to have been working, e.g.:

or:

And, before any of this Spurs stuff emerged, we were already being told that we needed to do something more to get people to come here rather than other African destinations:

So it does rather seem that people are having a go at SA Tourism, for… well… just doing their job.

And that seems unfair. What did these same people think of the way that SA Tourism spent their marketing budget last year? Or the year before? Or didn’t they even know that SA Tourism was a thing? Did they really imagine that people found their way on board flights to Cape Town and Joburg thanks to a lucky throw at a map on a dartboard?
This seems a naïve idea for everyone who clearly knows everything about tourism marketing.

A lot of people on Twitter said that the Arsenal “VISIT RWANDA” campaign didn’t work, but Rwanda is making more from tourism than ever before, and the fact that so many commentators were able to go straight to that campaign and draw parallels does suggest that (whether or not they had visited Rwanda), some sort of message had clearly got through.

But there is always a deep distrust of any agency spending public money in South Africa. Which brings me to the second problem: that the Daily Maverick immediately framed this deal as being secretive and dodgy. And yes, that taps nicely into the narrative and it’s certainly got tongues wagging, but again: how did the DM feel about previous expenditure from this department? Why single this out as being an issue? Is it because of the size of the deal? Because football is big business. And Premier League football is the biggest of the lot:

The 20 Premier League clubs collectively spent €830 million ($900 million) in the winter transfer window, which is more than triple the combined spending of the Italian Serie A, Spain’s La Liga, the German Bundesliga and French Ligue 1. That brings the Premier League’s total spending this season to almost €3.1 billion ($3.4 billion), shattering the previous spending record of €2.2 billion ($2.4 billion) set in the 2017/18 season.

And:

The Premier League is the most-watched sports league in the world, broadcast in 212 territories to 643 million homes and a potential TV audience of 4.7 billion.

More than 40% of the UK population watch Premier League football. That’s a lot of prospective tourists seeing the “Come to South Africa” message. And while I don’t expect them all to turn up, it wouldn’t take many for SA Tourism to break even.

And yet, the Daily Maverick could only interview one unnamed tourism expert who said:

And were apparently unable to find anyone who thought it was a good idea.

But then again, perhaps the Daily Maverick’s concerns were valid, given that they now seem to have found a (somewhat tenuous) link between the interim CFO of SA Tourism and an agency that was mentioned in the presentation about the potential deal.

The wording seems deliberately terrible. The language used is carefully crafted to make a story. And yet, the timeline doesn’t really fit, even reading the Daily Maverick’s version of events, and there seems to be quite a degree of overreach – the main link appears to be that the interim CFO did some tax work for the agency in question in the past – he had nothing to do with the Spurs deal except (bizarrely) apparently their using his laptop to present the Powerpoint which was “obtained” by the Daily Maverick earlier in the week, but then people only read the headline, not the story, and so now the whole deal is clearly corrupt.

And maybe it is. After all, everything else here seems to be. And all the social media experts say it must be and that it’s money wasted and, and, and…

Eish.

Living in SA is tiring.