“Mr President, pick up the phone and talk to the prime minister.”
Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa, CEO of the Tourism Business Council of SA, says President Cyril Ramaphosa needs “urgently” to speak to his opposite number in Downing Street, Boris Johnson, to get to the bottom of why the UK is keeping SA on its red list.
“If he hasn’t already done that, and I'm not sure that he has, then the president has to pick up the phone and talk to the prime minister. That is critical.”
If the UK was basing its decision on science, “which clearly it is not”, it should be possible to “solve this thing quite swiftly”.
“In the absence of science we need to understand if there is more so that we can address it.”
The president and prime minister need to meet with their respective scientific advisers to thrash out the issue of SA’s Beta variant as a matter of urgency, he says.
This has been cited as the UK’s chief reason for keeping SA on the red list although the dominant variant in the country is the Delta variant, as it is in the UK.
“The red list decision is a disaster for us,” says Tshivhengwa. It’s going to cost the local industry and the South African economy R181m every week that we remain on the red list.”
The local tourism industry has already lost 470,000 jobs as result of lockdown restrictions, he says, and will lose thousands more thanks to the British restrictions.
Our brand has been badly tarnished [by the recent rioting]. How do we build it going forward?
— Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa, Tourism Business Council of SA CEO
“We could get 100,000 people back at work if we reopened the UK market. It’s a bread-and-butter issue.”
He believes SA could have done far more to get itself off the list. “We could have had a well-thought-out, better co-ordinated strategy on how we should deal with the issue.”
SA’s high commission in London could have done more, he says.
“We could have been more forceful, we could have communicated better with the world in terms of where we are on the trajectory of the pandemic, which variant is more dominant. We could have made more use of the international media like the BBC and CNN. We could have been doing much more of that.”
More effective and co-ordinated communication is key to the recovery of the South African tourism industry from the pandemic and recent riots, he says.
“What is critical is us as a country, the entire collective, communicating properly to the world about how we are managing the pandemic.
“If we don’t communicate properly and we don’t position ourselves then this kind of thing [being kept on red lists] tends to happen.”
He believes that countries like India, that are off the red list, have been better at communicating than SA has.
“Those who position themselves and work the system get what they need. We need to communicate better. We have all these institutions that are tasked to communicate our message. They need to be doing it.
“What have we communicated to the world after the riots? About what is happening in Durban and Gauteng? That is key.”
The tourism industry communicates, “but we need the government to communicate. To say, ‘these are the facts, this is how we’ve dealt with the situation, this is how we’re moving forward’.
“Our brand has been badly tarnished. How do we build it going forward?”
The institutions that are tasked to deal with these issues must stand up and deal with them, he says.
Also key to the revival of the local industry is speeding up the vaccination rollout.
“Our slow vaccination rollout is a critical factor.
“We should have had far more people vaccinated by now so that other countries can look at us differently.
The number of jobs lost in the local tourism industry as a result of lockdown restrictions, according to the Tourism Business Council of SA’s Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa
— IN NUMBERS: 470,000
“If we want to talk about tourism recovery or international travellers coming to SA we need to be vaccinated.”
Underlying the communications failure of “SA Inc” is the continued failure of the government to take tourism seriously as a major contributor to GDP and jobs, he says.
“We can definitely double our contribution to GDP from 8% before the pandemic to around 16% by 2030.
“We get 2.6-million tourists coming from outside Africa. That’s nothing. If you look at other countries that get much more than this with much less to offer we should be getting at least 7-million or 8-million.”
But then the government needs to understand the potential of the industry to create jobs and contribute to the economy, and act as if it understands this.
“We’ve promoted this narrative and I think this understanding is beginning to creep in.”
But there’s a long way to go, he says.
Far too little progress has been made with the e-visas the government has been promising for years.
They still haven’t been rolled out in many EU and other important source countries, he says.
“We’ve been talking about this for two years. We really need to have rolled them out by now.”
The failure of the National Public Transport Regulator to issue vehicle licences for tour operators is “another big problem. We’ve raised that issue so many times it’s actually exhausting to be still talking about it.
“How do you create jobs, how do you promote entrepreneurship, when people who are buying vehicles to transport tourists can’t get permits? It’s unacceptable the way it has been dragging on for this long.
“There are so many discussions. We put our cases forward, we explain what the problem is, we are willing to come to the table. And then you get the department of transport just not moving. That’s unacceptable.”
He says it’s not enough for the president to talk about a recovery plan “if he doesn’t make it happen with action that is tangible, that the tourism industry can feel, and without excuses that run for years. That’s just too much.”
There have been too many damaging policy interventions such as the unabridged birth certificate “debacle” and the Tourism Amendment Bill to regulate Airbnb, which is still on the table in spite of its turn-off for potential tourists being pointed out.
“There are still things we need to deal with from a policy point of view. We can’t afford any more policy disasters.”
A long overdue tourism white paper policy review is being considered, which he hopes will remove red tape and lead to policies that are “progressive and support the industry rather than undermine it”.
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