Empty seats at Japan Vs. Camaroon
The South African government has reportedly spent more than 11 million rand (US$ 1.5 million) to buy up unsold World Cup tickets, and handed them out to those with connections to the governing ANC Party.
The 3,000 tickets were bought by the departments of tourism, communications, science and technology, public works and trade and industry, despite warnings not to by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan.
The news comes as world football governing body Fifa has launched an offense to explain why so many empty seats are being seen at the games – blaming everything from faulty transportation plans to foreign ticket holders who allegedly spent several hundred dollars per ticket yet somehow “never showed up” to claim them.
Tough sell: thousands of World Cup tickets went unsold
While Fifa claims the first seven matches of the Games averaged 91.9 percent of the stadiums’ “gross capacity,” the playoff between Greece and South Korea was 74.2 percent full, and the match between Algeria and Slovenia was had only 73.6 percent attendance.
Other matches, such as Cameroon and Japan in Bloemfontein, had 10,000 empty seats. Tuesday’s match between New Zealand and Slovakia in Rustenburg had only 23,871 show up, well below the official capacity of 38,646.
The Match agency, which paid US $120 million to sell 380,000 tickets as part of hospitality packages, blamed the economy and overpricing for lackluster sales. The company was forced to put 38,000 unused tickets, or 10 per cent of the agency’s allocation, on general sale Monday.
World Cup ticket
AfricanCrisis editor Jan Lamprecht notes that a Black lady friend of his was able to attend one game “for nothing” because of her “connections.”
The confirmation of taxpayer money being used to dole out football tickets was condemned by Democratic Alliance parliamentarian Tim Harris, who called the purchase “wasteful” and “potentially irregular.”
“The purchase of World Cup tickets by government departments, in many cases to hand out on the basis of patronage, is not an acceptable way for [them] to be spending their budgets, particularly in light of the fact that thousands of South Africans have either been turned away from purchasing tickets or are unable to afford them,” Harris said.
The National Health and Allied Workers’ Union (Nehawu) has called on the government departments to pay back the money spent on World Cup tickets.
“Our union finds it totally unacceptable that our townships are burning because of poor service delivery and millions go hungry everyday, yet the overpaid state bureaucrats are stealing the taxpayer’s money to watch soccer,” Nehawu said, adding that a full investigation should be launched into the “violation of the Public Finance Management Act.”
In addition, South Africa’s Business Day reports a further R12m (US $1.6 million) was splashed out by the Industrial Development Corporation (IDC), which also admitted spending R3m on the Nedbank Golf Challenge and R300000 on the Durban last July, in order “to enhance business relationships.”
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Even with this, the stadiums are not full. Total disaster, lol.
The best part about soccer in SA is the sound of those horns.
i too had wondered how so many ordinary looking south africans could afford the 500 to a 1000 dollar ticket price. now i understand….
Such corruption. No unlike what was seen in Haiti, http://www.youtube.com/user/DestroyZOG12#p/u/3/rZAzdZIjViM , just BIGGER!
Why are terror states like N.Korea and Iran allowed to play, whilst Suid Afrika was kicked out of the Olympics and this? Who has murdered more people, Boere or N.K. Bolsheviki? Iran threatens to annilliate a U.N. member aids terrorists and illegally developes nukes. Suid Afrika had them, and should have threatened to use them. Then world would have kissed their ass! Oh, but wait, they were a WHITE nation, so of course they were the greatest threat to “world peace” and “human rights” compared to these two monstrosities! All this bullshit Cup, is really bread and circuses for the Bantoes. The country is now a ceritified Afrikaan shithole, so what else to do you expect? The natives don’t know how to tie their shoes, but can go to the games. And notice how annoying those horns are? Imagine Die BoereVolk having to live with them?