As the dust settles on the much-talked-about cabinet reshuffle, attention has moved to portfolios that were left unaffected. One of these became apparent a day after the reshuffle during an address by Stone Sizani, South African ambassador to Germany, in Berlin.
Sizani told a tourism trade show the levels of crime in South Africa sabotaged our own progress not only in terms of making locals safe, but also against efforts to woo tourists, who contribute to job creation.
“News we get from home every day, especially we who are expected to attract visitors and investors, [makes us] disheartened because it makes our work more difficult. It makes the invitations we send out very scary to many people,” said Sizani.
He noted that German tourists were increasingly concerned with their safety in the country. Germany is SA’s third-biggest overseas market after the UK and US, with 173,146 of its citizens having visited the country last year, from 322,720 in 2019.
What is clear from this, emerging thousands of kilometres away from where newly appointed ministers were being sworn in on Monday, is that the country’s lackadaisical approach to crime fighting is not only costing us lives and health. It is also costing us investment, trade and jobs that are forfeited because potential tourists are scared away. The buffoonery we are subjected to in policing is costing us more ways than one.
We reported three weeks ago that German tourist Nick Frischke went missing in Cape Town. In October, a German tourist was killed in White River in Mpumalanga.
Deputy tourism minister Fish Mahlalela, addressing a press conference in Berlin, said the government has developed a tourism safety strategy and has trained and continues to train young people as safety monitors stationed in areas that attract tourists. The monitors work closely with the police and communities around those tourist attractions.
What is clear from this is that the battered tourism sector is trying to make a plan because it finds itself in a very difficult situation. It is almost as if it lures international tourists to their deaths. This tourism safety strategy would be obsolete if the police did their work. And tourists can’t have their island of safety that is not enjoyed by the broader population. A tourism safety strategy is the sort of thing that makes farmers believe they too could have their own safety secured outside the safety of the 60-million other South Africans.
Mahlalela is quite correct to say: “Without a doubt, the challenges around safety have negatively affected us and in the process undermined our marketing efforts.”
Our main problem is one that the cabinet reshuffle failed to touch on: the police ministry.
Not that we believe reshuffles are, in themselves, solutions to intractable challenges faced by our country. But where we see that a minister, Bheki Cele, has run out of ideas on how to deal with the scourge of crime, we should, we believe, be allowed to wonder if anyone else wouldn’t make a different plan. What we know for sure is that we are going nowhere slowly with the current police minister and his managers.
President Cyril Ramaphosa had a great opportunity with his reshuffle to save Sizani and Mahlalela from the kind of statements they are forced to make about crime and tourism by gifting us a new minister. But he chose not to. This, of course, presupposes a level of satisfaction with the incumbents. It beggars belief.
We are dying in our thousands. We get raped in our thousands. Tourists are abandoning our country in their thousands because they feel unsafe here.
In the words of Sizani, it “makes the invitations we send out very scary to many people”.
Tourists at least have an option not to come to our country. We are subjected to it. What more must happen to both tourists and locals before we get a leader in the police service with an idea of how to reduce crime?
