Cape Town - A local consumer rights group has lashed out at the South African Hajj and Umrah Council after the quota of South Africans permitted to undertake the annual pilgrimage to Mecca was reduced again this year.
The spiritual journey is one of the five pillars of Islam and is considered a religious duty that every able-bodied Muslim is encouraged to undertake at least once in their lifetime.
Every year, hundreds of thousands of people from across the world journey to Mecca, which is situated in Hejaz, the capital city of Saudi Arabia’s Makkah province.
Imraahn Mukaddam, who is a director at Consumer Fair and heads up the Friends of the Hajj group, which was established in 2011 in response to growing concern over how the pilgrimage was being administrated locally, said South Africa’s low quota was a direct result of “pathological mismanagement” within the council.
More than 16 000 South Africans have paid R100 each to be placed on the waiting list for the pilgrimage, but the Saudi Arabian government reduced the yearly quota from 2 500 to 2 000 due to renovations to Mecca’s grand mosque.
The council is responsible for accrediting a certain number of South Africans to meet the yearly quota. Mukaddam said rather than lobby to increase the quota, the council was nothing more than a “queue manager” for the Saudi Arabian government.
“I was told by the public protector that (the council) is essentially just an NGO.
“This means they have very little power and cannot and will not use South Africa’s good political relationship with Saudi Arabia as leverage to increase the quota.”
In contrast, he said, in countries with similar Muslim populations to South Africa, which has an estimated Muslim population of 2.5 million, far more people were permitted to undertake the pilgrimage.
He said the UK, Australia and the US were prime examples of countries with quotas that exceeded their per capita Muslim population.
Mukaddam has called on the Department of International Relations and Co-operation to intervene and administer the accreditation process themselves.
But Shaheen Essop, secretary-general for the council, said that the Saudi Arabian government had a strict formula for determining a country’s quota, with 1 000 people permitted to undertake the pilgrimage for every one million Muslims living in the country.
“Unfortunately, because our census does not take into account religious denominations, we are working off estimates.” He said the council was in talks with Stats SA to include denominations in the next census.
It was expected once renovations to the grand mosque had been completed, South Africa’s quota would be increased.
Essop warned that it would take almost seven years to work through the backlog of people on the waiting list.
Meanwhile, Essop said travel agents who hadcast a shadow over the pilgrimage of 2011, when more than 1 000 pilgrims had bought travel packages that never materialised, seemed to have been stamped out.