Don't worry, be happy, the World Cup is coming to Africa!
Clearly, someone in the upper echelons of Zanu (PF) is hawking the idea that the 2010 World Cup will be the panacea for Zimbabwean tourism. Seriously, the "Environment and Tourism Minister Mr Francis Nhema told the House of Assembly on Wednesday that several committees had been established to strategize on how the country could derive maximum benefit from the soccer showcase."
A slew of articles have been written, mostly in the state-owned media, lamenting that we won't have enough beds to house the tourists during this upcoming tourism boom and complaining that we only have one 5-star hotel left in the country. Today, Zimbabwe is currently visited primarily by foreign aid agency workers and the 3-million odd Zimbabwean diaspora that take trips home from time to time to visit their families.
Zimbabwe once received 6% of its GDP from tourism, now this figure is 2% and dropping (bear in mind here that the overall GDP is shrinking too). The reasons for the decline in international tourist arrivals are: concerns about safety (as a result of the unstable political environment); a risk of being accused of being an illegally operating, undercover journalist; chronic fuel shortages; and reports of government-sanctioned hunting in National Parks.
Wildlife tourism certainly has the potential to help Zimbabwe recover economically from the last 6 years of devastating corruption and abuse of power. The World Tourism Council indicates that Zimbabwe has the potential 12% of its GDP from tourism. However, no matter how many hotels are built, or how many free soccer tickets Zanu PF officials can wangle for themselves, no-one is addressing any of the underlying causes that are currently detering prospective international visitors.
Clearly, if all goes according to plan, these causative factors will remain unresolved, or worsened by the year 2010, and we'll have wasted a whole bunch more taxpayer money on hare-brained schemes by inept politicians - it's a good thing then that we can just print more money every time we run out or just lop a few zeros off the currency when it becomes too difficult to count.
Perhaps, before we see any more of people's precious time wasted on this issue, we should consider these 4 things:
1) The World Cup is taking place in South Africa, Zimbabwe is not South Africa.
2) The World Cup is 4 years away and may spike Zimbabwean tourism by a total of 1 month either side of the event, but we have no short-term plans to rescue our flailing tourist industry. If things continue to decline at this rate there won't be any hotels left in Zimbabwe by 2010!
3) In the last 6 years, tourism revenues have declined and hundreds of hotels have either closed or moved onto a skeleton-staff hibernation plan because they are simply no longer viable businesses. Building hotels in a shrinking tourism economy is basically building white elephants that we already have a glut of.
4) Tourists don't read the Herald, they read The Minneapolis Star Tribune, The Houston Chronicle, the International Herald Tribune, ABC News, The Cape Argus, Yahoo News, The Washington Post, The Mail and Guardian, Pretoria News. All of these news sources carried a story on 18 October 2006 about how tourists witnessed National Parks officers illegally hunting animals in National Parks.
Now that's what I call a publicity campaign!
By Brian Gratwicke (October 2006)ZimConservation Synthesis Report No. 5