Patricia de Lille appears to have hammered the final nail into the coffin of the Tottenham Hotspur sponsorship deal.
The English Premier League club stood to score a whopping R1 billion of South African taxpayers money, in a deal that would see our tourism logos appear on their jersey sleeves.
The idea was that soccer fans, being a fanatically loyal bunch, would eventually become curious about our country and come visit us in their droves as tourists, giving us an ongoing stream of return-on-investment.
In a perfect world where we as a country were doing well with a stable economy, marginal crime levels and significant social progress, it wouldn’t be an entirely bad idea.
It’s for that reason that so many people, including the president, voiced their disapproval and even disgust at the very thought of spending such a fortune on something with no immediate benefit.
And the very thought that the money was leaving the country and going to an institution that hardly needed it, just added insult to injury.
Auntie Pat would have none of it and made it one of her first tasks when she took over the national tourism portfolio earlier this month.
She took legal advice and came to the conclusion that the deal is unlawful and invalid and instructed SA Tourism to stop any further progress towards final signatures.
The outrage was of course completely justified, especially from cash-strapped sports federations, who would see even just a small fraction of such a fortune as a godsend.
Just last week, I wrote about a 21-year-old Shaiyene Fritz from Lavender Hill, who needed just R40 000 to attend a global pool championship in China.
She had to rely on donations and selling washing powder on the side, to raise the funds, and yet - should she win the R12.5 million prize – her story would prove a marketing boon for the country.
In other words, an immediate return-on-investment that the Spurs deal couldn’t match.
As I said then, there are many other young hopeless, hopeful and dormant potential in communities all over the country.
We hear of dozens such stories from the Cape Flats alone.
Just imagine how many thousands more there must be, and the disappointment a story like the Spurs deal must cause them.
Aunty Pat is expecting an answer from SA Tourism later this week, but I don’t think they will mess with her.
But now there’s an exciting new question to answer.
Since there’s a lot of desperate young sports people, hungry to represent us on the global stage in their sports of choice and since we now know that there’s potentially R1b available to advertise South Africa worldwide, by funding, sponsoring and promoting sports; what happens next, Auntie Pat?
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