A R250-million casino and entertainment development was officially opened in Bloemfontein on Tuesday night.
”The complex represents the largest-ever private sector investment in the Free State’s leisure industry,” Free State premier Beatrice Marshoff said at the opening of the Windmill Casino and Entertainment Centre.
”International experience and casino developments elsewhere in South Africa have clearly demonstrated the rapid and sustainable growth of the leisure sector should and could be the engine room of our province’s ambition to become one of the leading regions in Africa.”
Marshoff said the Free State was confronted by a range of development challenges.
”It is for this reason that we must increasingly look to the leisure industry, because it is a sector which has the ability through its labour intensiveness and positive economic knock-on effects to address the challenges.”
Buddy Hawton, chairperson of Sun International, said the Windmill signalled the beginning of a new empowerment chapter in the Free State.
”Together with our empowerment partners in this project [Mangaung Sun] it represents a significant further step forward in the transformation of the country’s leisure industry.
”Thirty percent of the equity in the company [Mangaung Sun] is in the hands of previously disadvantage individuals and groups and strict protocols have been instituted to ensure that broad-based empowerment takes place at every level of the value chain.”
Hawton said the black economic empowerment (BEE) programme at Windmill was not about the enrichment of the few.
It was instead about ”the genuine extension of shareholding and economic benefit [to] the ordinary working men and woman of the Free State”.
Joe Mhlambi, chairperson of Etapele, said the project’s empowerment shareholders were not members of a ”privileged elite”.
The empowerment partners in Mangaung Sun include the Thabo Community Trust and Etapele Investments, which consists of Belega Woman Investments, Umyeso Leisure, Tsela Tshoeu Investments and Mathabo Business Investments.
”These bodies represent a substantial number of shareholders who were drawn from the underprivileged communities of the Free State,” Mhlambi said.
”With the establishment of Windmill, we set new goals and standards in terms of broad-based empowerment, and I know of no other investment in the Free State in recent years in which the disadvantage sector received such preference as in this project.”
The new addition to the Free State’s tourism and leisure infrastructure was expected to add about R74-million to the province’s gross domestic product.
The casino could also contribute R25-million a year to the province’s public revenue in the form of gambling levies, rates, service fees and other taxes. – Sapa