The CEO of Isibindi Africa Lodges, Brett Gehren, has added his voice to many in the tourism and hospitality sector and written an impassioned open letter to President Cyril Ramaphosa to reconsider the plight of the tourism sector.
This follows news on Monday (July 13) that new regulations were published following Ramaphosa’s address to the nation on Sunday evening (July 12). The latest regulations explicitly prevent any kind of overnight travel for leisure travel within the country.
Gehren’s letter reflects what many in the sector are feeling. Here is the full letter:
Dear Mr President,
“I voted for you. I also quietly encouraged others to follow. When you put us into the first three-week lockdown, my heart filled at your decisive leadership and commanding vision. Today we are marching towards our fourth month of lockdown. I'm not going to give airtime to the nonsensical rules that have left our nation astonished.
Walk me through this Mr President. We have the largest tourism economy in Africa; a few hundred billion rand. 10% of all people employed in this country are employed in tourism. Tourism has deep roots; I have seen again and again how it can have an immediate and substantial effect on a rural community that doesn't have many other options. This is not to be sneezed at by a country with the highest Gini coefficient* in the world.
And yet, I can jump into a taxi with 16 other people (a light load where I come from) and sit in skin-to-skin contact with strangers for half an hour, hop out at a restaurant and enjoy a long lunch – as long it's under 50 people – and then on to the casino for a night of games. But heaven forbid you try visit a wilderness game or beach lodge and enjoy outside activities, heaps of fresh air and sleep in your private room, all the time enjoying world-class health and safety protocols.
Traversing in open-air game viewers is expressly not permitted. You can, however, drive yourselves around game reserves all squashed in a car. Our taxi industry is a fraction of the size of your tourism industry, Mr President.
Why are our employees not accorded the same respect?
Perhaps you can explain why Promise, one of our chefs, or Sthembiso, one of our guides, is not accorded the same recognition and respect? These skilled and valuable people now sit at home with hungry families, not earning a cent.
I have a few hundred employees who support a few thousand people, they are currently earning zero income. We didn't rest on our laurels when we were shut down. Thuma Mina – send me – we made the rallying call to all the people of Isibindi and they stepped forward and without hesitation gave of their time; game rangers, chefs, dive instructors, housekeepers, pool cleaners, marketeers, walking guides, barmen, laundry attendants; they all stepped up.
Food parcels for hungry community
Our Isibindi Foundation raised over half a million rand for food parcels and are still distributing over and over again.
I was arrested on one of these food drops because the Disaster Management officials said we were breaking the Act as they personally had to escort each and every one of our food parcels over vast areas. Using two four-wheel drives (with nine officials and traffic police) to follow our game viewers who were handing out potatoes, meal and sugar beans to our starving rural communities.
They drove for an hour every day just to reach the point from whence they would meet and ‘escort’ our vehicles. The community saw right through this parody. They would have been better off with more beans. But that's another story for another day.
Please reconsider the plight of the sector
You've had some of the best brains in the country available to you for four months to come up with a considered rescue plan for tourism. Our bewildered Tourism Minister – when asked of her plans for tourism in a plenary session – said she had plans to open an online platform for promoting clothing, handcraft and art.
The timeline of capricious promises, presidential website commitments and then hurried retractions and poorly drafted and misleading gazettes, are safely stored on Google. You addressed our nation on Sunday night, yet declined to speak of or to the tourism industry.
However, you gazetted, hours later, a very clear instruction that leisure tourism was not to be opened, indefinitely.
The callousness you have shown to our industry and its employees is staggering. This huge industry, which was to be our country's honeypot, with mining and construction tanking in recent years, has been broken in half. This will not only affect me and my staff and colleagues and friends in the industry. It will affect each and every South African.
Please reconsider the plight of our tourism sector. If intra-provincial tourism was allowed now it would help keep the industry partially intact. This would provide much-needed salaries and a starting platform for when provincial and international borders open and South Africa can stand proud, once again, as a world-class destination.”
*NOTE:
A Gini coefficient is a statistical measure of the degree of variation represented in a set of values, used especially in analysing income inequality.
