The Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) wants Sports, Arts and Culture Minister Gayton McKenzie to focus on dismantling systemic barriers that it says prevent the majority of citizens from accessing and excelling in sports.

The EFF congratulated the 149 athletes who represented South Africa at the 2024 Paris Olympics. A total of six medals were won.

The party also congratulated Kenya for its “remarkable performance” in securing 11 medals.

The party noted that while it celebrates Team SA victories, harsh realities continue to plague South African sports.

It said the lack of transformation across many sporting codes was a stark reminder of the African National Congress (ANC) government’s “failure to undo the systemic inequalities”.

The EFF highlighted that 30 years after the oppressive apartheid government denied Africans equal rights, the race demographics of Team SA do not reflect the country’s diversity.

“This highlights the fact that access to sports, like so many other areas of our society, is still largely determined by race and class,” it said.

The party claimed that government had failed to dismantle what it called the entrenched barriers that it believed prevented the majority of the country’s people from participating in and excelling in sports.

It also noted that the Sports, Arts and Culture Ministry had failed to focus on the fundamental barriers that it said existed for black children to achieve sporting excellence.

“Instead of eradicating these barriers, the department is a corrupt entity for the politically connected and infamous for issuing condolences,” the EFF said.

It warned that the continuous economic marginalisation of black and African people in particular, meant that the majority of South Africans were excluded from sports that required expensive training and equipment.

It stated that this exclusion was not just a reflection of economic inequality but also a deliberate perpetuation of racial exclusion in sports.

Meanwhile, the EFF also said that while it appreciated that sports sanctions could be a tool for addressing oppressive regimes, it believed that excluding Russia from participating in the 2024 Olympics was weaponised “to take a vindictive stance against Russia for defending itself against Ukraine”.

“This was particularly hypocritical given that apartheid Israel was not sanctioned while continuing to commit acts of genocide against Palestinian people. This selective application of sanctions reveals the underlying bias and the use of sports as a political tool by imperialist forces, which the EFF strongly condemns,” it said.