At the Tourism Update party celebrating the last day in office of Home Affairs Minister Malusi Gigaba, the consensus was that it was hard to believe that someone so inept had got so far.
Despite what President Cyril Ramaphosa said, what the Minister of Tourism, Derek Hanekom, said and what Gigaba himself said, October has come and gone and the regulations governing minors travelling is still in full force.
The real problem, though, lies deeper. Forty-eight years ago, the first edition of our sister publication Travel News Weekly carried a story ‘Tourism report disappoints’. The article, by John H Marsh (my father), was disbelieving that the then Minister of Tourism could report back to Parliament that the paltry budget he had been allocated was sufficient: Why did we want to encourage foreigners to come to South Africa to tell us how to run the country? said Frank Waring, great rugby player and the token English speaker in the Nationalist government.
But it was the IFP’s Mangosuthu Buthelezi who then further sowed the seeds of our current problem. At the turn of the century, while Minister of Home Affairs, he changed the law to ensure new regulations would in future need to be referred to an Immigration Advisory Board. Problem was, it was filled with lawyers and immigration experts. Nobody from the private tourism sector sat on the board.
Gigaba is usually blamed for the unabridged birth certificate fiasco but, in fact, it was on Naledi Pandor’s watch that it was promulgated. He arrived at Home Affairs when it was a fait accompli.
What made Gigaba so despised was his failure to engage the tourism industry meaningfully when it became apparent that the regulations were so damaging.
Why has he remained so intransigent? Was it because there was a big IT contract needed to change the passport system to reflect the names of both parents on minors’ passports (possible)?; was it at the instruction of the security cluster to stop families from neighbouring states from overwhelming our stretched health and education facilities (likely)?. We can be sure it had nothing to do with the stated reason: trafficking of children. Hopefully, one day we will know.
The lesson is that, although travel and tourism is a massive employer, it has few big players and industrialists, and its importance has been historically overlooked.
The Department of Tourism is working hard to change this, and the industry should be doing everything it can to help in getting travel and tourism the job creation recognition it should have.
