Local Organising Committee (LOC) board members have agreed to receive zero remuneration for their contribution to the Africa Cup of Nations 2013 tournament, chairman Mwelo Nonkonyana said on Tuesday.
Briefing Parliament's sports portfolio committee, Nonkonyana did not exclude the possibility that board members could be compensated if profits were made from the tournament.
He told MPs they had received a recommendation from their finance committee on Monday to waive compensation.
"In the view of the cut (in the budget) even the allowance of board members won't be provided for... it's nil, zilch, because there's no money," said Nonkonyana.
The Afcon budget was revised downwards by Finance Minister Pravin Gordhan last month.
LOC chief executive officer Mvuso Mbebe said initial talks were about a budget of R425 million, but this was revised to R335
million. Direct government grants to the LOC, host cities and the departments involved would total just over R205 million.
The rest of the money would come from sponsorships (R15.5million), commercial entities (R62 million) and Confederation of African Football (R52 million).
Close to R39 million would be spent on remunerating staff members at headquarters and in provinces. Operating expenses were expected to be around R224 million, while R45 million would be spent on related events, and R22 million on travel and accommodation.
A surplus of R534,000 was forecast.
Mbebe would not speak about a possible loss, should Bafana Bafana not advance past the qualifying stages.
Mbebe said ticket sales were advancing at an acceptable level.
"In the first phase of ticketing, we didn't expect a lot of people to be buying tickets, because we did not know which countries qualified... by 24 October, 19,966 tickets were sold."
Currently, between 1200 and 1500 tickets were being sold per day.
"If we continue at that rate, we're not doing badly, but we want to up that a bit... we know there's going to be a rush at the end of November and in December when people get their bonuses."
Mbebe said the target was to sell 350,000 or 70 percent of the 500,000 tickets by December 20.
There were three ways people could purchase tickets, either through a call centre (087-980-3000), a website (www.afcon2013.eqtickets.com) or at selected Spar outlets.
People would get reference numbers and the actual tickets could be picked up after December 1.
"It's not a ticket, it's a voucher for you to collect a ticket... and it's done for various reasons, a way of us curbing people trying to produce fraudulent tickets."
Mbebe said the only people who knew what the tickets looked like were LOC security staff, one person from the State Security Agency, and the ticketing company. – Sapa