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Business Times reports that 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.
He added that the president and prime minister needed to meet with their respective scientific advisers to thrash out the issue of SA’s Beta variant as a matter of urgency. 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. It’s going to cost the local industry and the South African economy R181m every week that we remain on the red list,” Tshivhengwa advised The local tourism industry has already lost 470,000 jobs as result of lockdown restrictions and will lose thousands more thanks to the British restrictions. “We could get 100,000 people back at work if we reopened the UK market. It’s a bread-and-butter issue,” Tshivhengwa pointed out. In his view, 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. 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,” Tshivhengwa complained. Underlying the communications failure of “SA Inc” was the continued failure of the government to take tourism seriously as a major contributor to GDP and jobs, he claimed. The government needed “to understand the potential of the industry to create jobs and contribute to the economy, and act as if it understands this,” he pointed out.
- Read the full original of the report in the above regard by Chris Barron at BusinessLive (subscriber access only)
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