Major research institutions have found that the sector hardest hit by the pandemic has been tourism. A 2021/22 Tourism Report by StatsSA showed that the number of visitors to SA dropped by 71% since the Covid-19 lockdowns from 2020.
These numbers may be similar to the rest of the tourism world but for SA they have a far more devastating impact. Tourism in SA is one of the major employers, especially for our high number of semi-skilled workers, including young people.
In 2016, StatsSA found that tourism employs more people than the mining industry and contributes far more to the economy than agriculture. In fact, as the manufacturing sector in SA continues to bleed jobs, the tourism sector remains one of the few that continues to create more working opportunities every year.
Put differently, tourism is a precious leg of our economy, and provides much hope for the sustainability of livelihoods.
At the beginning of April, President Cyril Ramaphosa ended the Covid state of disaster and reopened all the arms of the economy. At that stage SA was recording its highest rate of unemployment and its economy was on its knees. but the situation has not seen any improvement. Yet tourism provides the best option to unlock a quick recovery that could put our economy on a positive trajectory.
But here’s the problem. Tourism does not emerge out of pure magic. It needs a specific set of conditions in place for it to punch at its maximum potential. The latest statistics published by the police minister show that our crime rates are too high to ignore – and these are violent crimes such as murder, rape, hijacking, human trafficking, and mugging.
Innocent people are losing belongings that they worked so hard for – and some even their lives – in a country that clearly has no capacity to catch criminals and bring them to book. Our prosecuting authority is still unable to pin down who killed the former Bafana Bafana captain Senzo Meyiwa – eight years after the incident.
State capture reports have been released with clear cut evidence of who stole from poor people – yet no high-profile arrests have yet been made.
Recently, the daughter of a member of parliament, Hillary Gardee, was brutally killed and there are slim chances of finding those responsible.
Foreign nationals with darker skins from the continent are living in constant fear of being attacked by locals and by the police.
Every single day SA is littered with these stories of violent crimes and the law enforcement agencies continue to display their incapacity to keep our citizenry safe.
Tourists don’t visit countries with these problems. Locals don’t go to unsafe locations either.
Our tourisms hotspots like the Cape Town’s Table Mountain and the heritage sites in Gauteng are all being targeted by these similar crimes. We all know of a Ukrainian tourist that was stabbed to death in 2019 whilst hiking on the Table Mountain - and the robbery and murder at Sakhumzi restaurant in Vilakazi street in 2017.
Many more of these cases go unreported as we’ve heard time and again that tourists would normally prefer to quietly get on the plane and go home after experiencing the trauma of crime with their loved ones whilst on a South African tour.
Beyond crime, we also have other pressing challenges that threaten tourism such as the flooding disasters that are now beginning to be more common.
Again, these are largely of our own subjective weaknesses as a country in not maintaining crucial infrastructure and not driving the necessary investments in building decent human settlements of conducive lands for working poor people.
We do not take the climate change debate seriously either including its consequences. Above all, our prices of food and fuel are too high for working-class tourists to afford. It is becoming too expensive to stay, travel, and lodge in SA.
What these factors seem to do now as a consequence is present to us a highly unequal lifestyle of tourism. As major cities and their key attractions are proving to be unsafe, tourists are now beginning to explore small towns through AirBnB and game drives for their stays with family and friends.
These options benefit the wealthiest hosts who own these places and no indirect benefit will flow out to a nearby chesa-nyama or tavern.
These emerging small geographies of tourism will continue to accelerate inequality in this sector and possibly stifle its potential recovery unless we address crime and all the instability in our country that threatens this entire enterprise.
• Dr Mzileni is a research associate in the faculty of humanities at Nelson Mandela University
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