America’s prime cultural export, Nicki Minaj won’t be gracing the inaugural TribeOne Dinokeng Festival with her presence. Her appearance was cancelled on Thursday because of disappointing ticket sales and poor planning.
The festival was to have been held at the end of this month in Cullinan, near Pretoria, with Anaconda rapper Minaj, and Nigerian singer Tiwa Savage among the stars expected to appear.
Organisers Rockstar 4000 announced the cancellation yesterday. It blamed the City of Tshwane for failing to provide infrastructure for the concert at the open show site, but the municipality has already spent R40.5-million on access roads, electricity, water and free-Wi-Fi infrastructure for the event.
Rockstar 4000 had already been paid R25-million by the Tshwane municipality, which has made an urgent application to the Pretoria High Court to invalidate the cancellation.
Council spokesman Selby Bokaba said the organisers had sold only 4000 tickets instead of the projected 100000.
“We are ready to hand over the site on Monday, as agreed. The issue is about money not about infrastructure. They have never raised that during our weekly stakeholder meetings,” he said.
Bokaba said the council suspected that Rockstar 4000 was in financial trouble last week when it asked for a further R20-million from the municipality and hinted that it wanted to postpone the concert to April.
He said the cancellation was announced on Thursday last week, by which time all the infrastructure was in place.
Tickets for the three-day concert sold for between R480 and R1450.