ECONOMY-SOUTHERN AFRICA: Accommodating Tourism during the Holiday Season

By James Hall Reprint | | Print |

James Hall

GABORONE, Botswana, Dec 6 2002 (IPS) - The opening this week of Botswana’s new showcase convention centre in the capital Gaborone is one indication of Southern African nations’ push to accommodate tourism during the key December holiday month.

It occurred within a week of the signing of a multinational treaty to establish the world’s largest transfrontier game park spanning South Africa, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, a facility expected to draw tourists just from the novelty of its size.

But the reality of this week is the 5200-square-metre 15-million-U.S.- dollar Gaborone International Convention Centre, whose main room seats 1,800. A secondary auditorium seats 1,000 and a cocktail area accommodates 1550.

– Given the networking that goes on at conventions, the cocktail area is probably the most important feature," Gail Lippincott, a Botswanan travel agent, told IPS.

In addition to the main rooms given local names (the Tsodilo Suite, the Serondella Rooms, the San-Ta-Wani Suite), the centre has a giant marquee for outside events for 6,000 guests. But most impressive was the duration of construction time, only 10 months from start to finish after President Festus Mogae bestowed his blessing on plans for a ‘’rld class convention centre”

2000 also saw a new convention centre in Durban, South Africa and a refurbished convention centre in the Johannesburg suburb of Sandton pressed into use for major international summits. The World Summit on Sustainable Development, or Earth Summit II, was hosted by South Africa in August in part to showcase the country as a travel destination to 6,000 dignitaries and journalists.

The fruits of such boosterism are coming now, at the end of the year that has seen unofficial tourism numbers rise from 15 percent to 20 percent in South Africa. In a year where global tourism dropped due to economic turndowns and terrorism fears, most Southern African nations recorded stable or slightly higher tourism numbers. An exception was Zimbabwe, where tourism is expected to drop by 60 percent to 80 percent due to political turmoil and travellers’ advisory warnings posted by some European nations.

Offering a broader picture, the World Trade Organisation reported that tourism numbers and revenue earned from tourists increased approximately one-third between 1996 and 2001 in the 14 nations that comprise Southern Africa.

‘’Southern Africa has just what European, Asian and North American vacationers desire this time of year: escape from the Northern winter,” Alice Simelane, who arranges package tours of the KwaZulu/Natal region of South Africa, told IPS. ôWhen it’s cold up there, it is warm here, and Africa is much closer than Australia and less expensive than South America,’ ‘ she said.

The 2002 holiday season began this week with the celestial spectacle of a total solar eclipse darkening the skies and quickening pulses from Angola, through Zambia, Zimbabwe, Botswana, South Africa, Mozambique and out to the waters off Madagascar.

Unfortunately, one of South Africa’s key viewing areas of the early morning eclipse, at Kruger National Park, was overcast. Cloud cover obscured eclipse viewing in Mozambique. Few visitors were in Zimbabwe to witness the eclipse. Angola and Zambia do not yet have sufficient tourism infrastructure to accommodate the global sect of ‘’shadow chasers” who schedule their holidays around eclipses, wherever they occur in the world.

‘’The trouble with scheduling holidays around events that depend entirely on the cooperation of the weather is that the weather so often doesn’t cooperate,” German tourist Hans Mann told IPS after returning from cloudy Kruger Park.

That is why the Great Limpopo Transfrontier Park (GLTP) will be a boost to the region’s tourism, because its size will allow a diversity of sights, animals and environments, not to mention ecosystems with differing weather patterns. Long in the works, the treaty to formally establish the conservation area will be signed on Dec 9 by South Africa’s President Thabo Mbeki, Mozambique President Joachim Chissano, and Zimbabwe’s President Robert Mugabe.

Extending from South Africa’s Kruger National Park, Mozambique Limpopo National Park and the Gonarezhou National Park in Zimbabwe, the facility will rival the great-established parks of Kenya, Tanzania and Botswana’s unspoiled Central Kalahari. But just as South Africa is the regional economic powerhouse on which neighbouring nations depend for their own economies, the advanced infrastructure of Kruger Park will support Mozambique and Zimbabwe’s areas of the GLTP.

Over 1100 animals have been ôtranslocated" from Kruger to Mozambique, including 40 elephants.

‘’Unfortunately, the elephants have by now all migrated back to Kruger,” a veteran Southern African conservationist told IPS on condition of anonymity. ‘’There hasn’t been much publicity about it, but those in the conservation field know that nature took its course with the elephant’s homing instinct.”

In time, conservationists say, animals will make homes of new areas to which they will be introduced.

Among other key tourism developments in the region at year’s end was Botswana’s announcement of a 24-million-U.S.-dollar five-year tourism plan. The cultural sites of Okavango Delta will be made more accessible to visitors, with local people contributing to tourism projects. The Makagadikgadi Pans, an important wetland area, will be simultaneously preserved and exploited for its tourism potential.

The plan hopes to resolve conflict between local people and the country’s burgeoning elephant population, now numbers 12,000. Elephants have been destructive to crops and properties, raising fears of farmers’ vigilante action against marauding herds.

The murder of a Japanese tourist in the Mpumalanga Province of South Africa, situated between Johannesburg and Swaziland, was widely reported in the Asian press, and furthered the province’s reputation as being a dangerous spot for tourists. Three German tourists were also killed there last week. Over 30 other tourist attacks have been recorded in Mpumalanga this year. The provincial police responded last week by setting up a special task force to target criminals who target tourists.

Mpumalanga tourism officials launched their own idea, a telephone hot line for tourists called Eblockwatch. Any visitor lost or in trouble dials the line, the tourism office immediately sends out e-mail alerts to industry members in the visitor’s vicinity, and they rush to assist in any way they can.

Organisers of the help line say it is merely a high tech version of traditional African hospitality offered visitors.