As the ongoing pandemic keeps foreign tourists away and the game lodges remain shut, veteran wildlife tourism operator Keith Vincent now spends most of his time counselling his workers.
“I spend about 60% of my time keeping people in the right frame of mind,” said Vincent, chief executive of Wilderness Holdings, which owns 45 lodges and operates wilderness tours across Africa.
“What will come out of the pandemic over time is the psychological and human damage.”
Like most tourism companies hammered by the global shutdown of the sector, Wilderness saw its revenue grind to a halt in March.
While he managed to keep most of the company’s 2,700 staff employed, the company had slashed costs by implementing pay cuts.
“That had a ricochet effect with our ability to pay people.”
It is a similar tale throughout SA’s wildlife tourism industry, a business that is largely dependent on dollar-bearing tourists for survival.
Across the board, lodge owners and management companies have had to mothball camps and furlough staff as revenue dries up.
This has had a dramatic effect on staff who are generally drawn from the surrounding communities where employment opportunities are otherwise paltry.
Mala Mala Game Reserve, one of the SA’s oldest private reserves, closed all three of its camps on March 27 and its staff had taken pay cuts of up to 50%.
More than three-quarters of the reserve’s staff could not work during the lockdown and the effect on the operation had been “devastating”, said MD Alison Morphet.
Mala Mala, which is a community-owned reserve, relies on three different revenue streams – lease fees, dividends and a community tourism levy – all of which evaporated during lockdown.
“The financial impact on our local community has been significant,” she said.
The financial impact on our local community has been significant.
— Alison Morphet, Mala Mala MD
Other knock-on effects included disruptions to Mala Mala’s bursary and internships programmes, which educate members of the community and provide them with work experience.
Morphet noted that no new jobs had been created in the past nine months.
Luxury lodge operator andBeyond, which manages two properties in the Sabie Sand Game Reserve and owns the six lodges in Phinda Private Game Reserve, had opted to “hibernate” lodges rather than close them outright.
“Where we had two camps in an area we would consolidate the demand into one of them,” said chief marketing officer Nicole Robinson.
The company had avoided retrenching staff but after July had implemented pay cuts on a tiered system.
Having pioneered the sustainable development model under predecessor Conservation Corporation, Robinson said the three decades of investment in the local communities had paid off.
“We did not notice any rise in bushmeat poaching,” she said, adding the company had supported the surrounding community at Phinda.
Through the Africa Foundation, its development arm, the company also raised some $500,000 for food assistance and PPE for schools.
The increase in subsistence household level poaching for the pot correlates with rampant unemployment figures.
— Inge Kotze, Singita conservation GM
Inge Kotze, conservation GM at luxury lodge operator Singita, said the effects of the lockdown had varied across the region, starting with a dramatic decrease in poaching pressure during the hard lockdown between March and May.
Bushmeat poaching began rising again when level 3 restrictions took effect.
“The increase in subsistence household level poaching for the pot [in the region] correlates with rampant unemployment figures, reduced household incomes and job losses and increased food insecurity,” she said.
Kotze estimated unemployment in the region to be about 42% and rising monthly.
To stave off a humanitarian crisis in the region as well as reduce poaching, Singita had worked with NGOs and the private sector to set up soup kitchens and provide food parcels to the communities surrounding its Kruger area lodges.
Since May, the Singita Lowveld Trust’s ECD Food relief had supported 7,000 people with emergency food parcels.
“The untold story is the level of starvation in rural areas,” said Vincent, adding he had never encountered such levels of hunger in his four decades in the safari industry.
“There are cases where three or four siblings have been laid off and the whole family is at home, and the whole of Southern Africa has had a drought.”
The untold story is the level of starvation in rural areas.
— Keith Vincent, veteran wildlife tourism operator
At the other end of the scale are smaller game reserves such as Mankwe Wildlife Reserve in North West, where operations manager Lynne MacTavish has been doing everything in her power to stave off bushmeat poachers while also keeping all the staff employed.
The reserve, which relies on groups of students from mostly the US and UK doing degree work, has depended on donations for survival.
“We’ve kept all our staff,” said MacTavish. “I’m proud of that.”
But with the UK clamping down on arrivals from SA, Mankwe faces an uncertain future. While MacTavish has run specials to attract domestic tourists, even that is not enough to sustain the reserve.
“We charge R200 per person a night and people still ask if that’s the cheapest rate I can offer,” she said. “I really don’t know what we’re going to do.”
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