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The Citizen reports that the Covid-19 lockdown has severely crippled the restaurant business and despite partial reopening of the industry, the daily closures of restaurants have left 80% of workers unemployed.
On Wednesday, President Cyril Ramaphosa announced further reopening of sectors during Level 3 lockdown, including restaurants for sit-down meals instead of regulated delivery or collection. But according to Restaurant Association of SA chief executive Wendy Alberts, the industry has already been destroyed. She said she received between 10 and 15 messages a day from restaurant owners who were closing their business. SA has about 23,000 restaurants employing at least 800,000 people. “So far it is about 700 closures. We are currently in a situation where we have 80% of our staff unemployed,” Alberts indicated. It was too late for a recovery plan as people were unemployed due to business closures, she pointed out. Ramaphosa emphasised that agreed stringent safety requirements would have to be in place before a business could reopen. But should government reinstate the former regulation that stipulated only 50 customers at a time, restaurants would not survive, said Alberts. “All the proposals of protocol and measurements put in place to indicate that we can safely open would have been wasted,” she remarked.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Rorisang Kgosana on page 4 of Saturday Citizen of 20 June 2020
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