Over 500 small and medium-sized businesses
have been forced to close their doors in Cape Town’s
CBD in the past 18-month alone.
But some are not as unfortunate.
Sail-Stadefrance, the company who was
awarded the tender to operate Greenpoint stadium, secured
a contract that would have seen them pay a leasing fee
of R100 000 per year, for the stadium.
That’s less than R300 a day.
To hire the stadium for a day for an event would probably
cost me in the region of R100 000, so it would be fair
to say that Sail-Stadafrance got a very good deal.
But this is South Africa, and one thing
we can depend on in South Africa is incompetence.
Cape Town seems to have
developed a special affinity to miscalculations and
typos that result in million dollar blunders.
It turns out that ‘errors in the
document’s text and figures’ may result
in Sail-Stadafrance only having to pay R1 a year!
Then again, as the Greenpoint Ratepayers
Association points out, relative to the cost of building
the stadium – in the region of R7-billion –
the difference between R1 and R100 000 is actually negligible.
Both amounts are pitiful in terms of
an annual rent for such a structure.
The maintenance of the place will probably cost the
taxpayer more than R100 000 a week.
In fact, that R100 000 per week is hardly
enough to line the coffers of those responsible for
maintaining the stadium, so I doubt whether there will
be anything left to spend on actual maintenance anyway.
Kader Khan
Editor
info@yummie.co.za