By Ed Herbst*
“Mbalula has spent R110m on awards ceremonies in two years; the three-year Olympic budget is R25m.” Gareth van Onselen
The Tourism Business Council has warned that the ban on four federations from bidding for international events by Sports Minister Fikile Mbalula could have a devastating effect on inbound tourism.
In response the Minister’s spokesman Esethu Hasane said that “transforming” the country was a far more important consideration than the potential loss of tourist income.
This must have made Tourism Minister Derek Hanekom wince. It was he, after all, who had to watch people in the tourism industry losing their jobs and small tourism businesses closing their doors as the visa regulations arrogantly imposed by Minister of Home Affairs, Malusi Gigaba, wiped billions off the economy.
Hasane’s equally arrogant dismissal of the concerns expressed by the Tourism Business Council took me back to the first time I met Gigaba as a reporter working for SABC television news in the state broadcaster’s Cape Town office.
In 2004 he was made Deputy Home Affairs Minister and he called a media conference in August of that year when it was said he would announce his plans to combat child pornography.
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We dutifully found parking in Cape Town’s CBD and hefted our gear – camera, tripod, lights and mic stands – up to his office. Upon arrival we were told to carry them out of the building again to a waiting bus.
Along with the rest of the puzzled press corps, I and my cameraman travelled along Voortrekker Road until we stopped in the grey and dour industrial heartland of Parow outside a nondescript double-storey building.
As we were then to discover, this was the distribution warehouse of Adult World, an entirely legitimate pornography chain which had opened some four years previously.
The owner is Arthur Calamaras and a Lamborghini – somewhat raucous to the distress of his neighbours – testifies to his acumen as a businessman.
Calamaras listed with incredulity and then visibly mounting anger as Gigaba explained his child pornography mission. Inviting us inside, Calamaras pointed out that he ran a successful franchise business which was represented in all major cities. Given that, he asked, why would he jeopardise a successful business which employed dozens of people throughout the country by selling illegal goods. It was a question that Gigaba chose not to answer.
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This had been a manifestly stupid attempt to garner cheap publicity and I was angry. Angry because I had lived through an era when I had had to film bewildered German tourists being loaded into police vans after yet another raid on Sandy Bay – an era when the stultifying norms and mores of the National Party had dictated our lives – and we had moved on from that era.
I was not, however, as angry as a friend – a Boeing pilot who has followed his father’s career – when Gigaba donned the uniform of an airline pilot for the opening of parliament in 2014. The pilot of an airliner occupies a position of extraordinary responsibility and, mindful of the sacrifices that he and his father had made to attain that position, he was justifiably distressed by Gigaba’s behaviour.
The frightening thing is that Mbalula and Gigaba are regarded by the ANC as among their brightest stars and Gigaba has been touted by some in the party as a future leader of this country.
Should that day dawn neither Arthur Calamaras nor the many people who have, and will still, lose their jobs and their businesses through the decisions of people like Mbalula and Gigaba, approve.
Neither, I imagine, will Derek Hanekom.
- Ed Herbst is a pensioner and former reporter who writes ‘in his own capacity’
