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The Portfolio Committee on Tourism yesterday received briefings from the Tourism Transformation Council on its action to advance transformation in the tourism sector and from South African Tourism on active contracts and challenges.

Minister of Tourism Patricia de Lille submitted a letter of apology to the committee for her absence from the meeting. This led committee members to express their concern over her persistent absence, as she has not attended portfolio committee meetings since 2 September.

The Chairperson of the Portfolio Committee on Tourism, Ms Ronalda Nomalunga, said the committee will write to the Speaker of the National Assembly to inform her of the Minister’s absence. She said that the Minister needs to be present in these meetings to answer questions from committee members.

The committee was supposed to engage with the SAT but unfortunately only received the entity’s presentation before the meeting yesterday, which did not give the committee enough time to familiarise itself with the contents. The SAT was accompanied by the Deputy Minister, who was unable to provide any information as she is not responsible for the entity.

The committee is aggrieved that the Minister has not provided it with the information that she presented in the public domain in the meeting of 2 September 2025. This has happened despite numerous attempts by the committee requesting her to do so. This, coupled with her office delaying sending presentations on time and her continuous absence at meetings dealing with critical governance issues at South African Tourism renders the oversight work of the committee ineffective.
 
The situation whereby the Department of Tourism keeps receiving clean audits whilst South African Tourism continues to receive negative audit outcomes cannot be allowed to continue. South African Tourism receives more than 50 per cent of the budget allocated to the Tourism Vote, and therefore clean audits by the Department of Tourism are meaningless if the Minister continues to ignore governance issues and malfeasance at the entity.

Issued by the Parliamentary Communication Services on behalf of the Chairperson of the Committee on Tourism, Ronalda Nalumango