Fedhasa urges Ramaphosa to end state of disaster as Sona approaches

Removing the national state of disaster is at the top of the Federated Hospitality Association of Southern Africa’s (Fedhasa) wish list as President Cyril Ramaphosa prepares to deliver his annual state of the nation address on Thursday.

First imposed on March 15 2020, the national state of disaster gives the government the flexibility to institute swift measures aimed at curbing the spread of Covid-19, such as restrictions on indoor and outdoor gatherings, the sale of alcohol and international travel.

“The hospitality sector has largely borne the brunt of changing lockdown regulations in terms of business closures and job losses, despite putting in place stringent health and hygiene protocols,” said Fedhasa chair Rosemary Anderson.

“It is our view, based on the current profile of the pandemic in SA, that the centralisation of these extraordinary powers is no longer required and that individual departments should once again be tasked with the role of providing an enabling environment for businesses to flourish.”

She said in the case of tourism and hospitality, this includes improving the visibility and accessibility of SA to inbound international markets through a proper e-visa system and additional budget for tourism marketing to restore the destination’s reputational issues caused by the Omicron variant at the end of 2021.

“Temporary waivers should be considered for key markets and segments and a best-of-breed, world-class fully automated e-visa should be instituted to replace the manual processing that currently takes place. Otherwise we will fall further behind our competitors. It is far too difficult for some of our key source markets to get visas.”

The small window of opportunity to raise the profile of SA as a destination is closing, with Australia, SA’s largest long-haul competitor, announcing it would reopen borders soon.

“The destination’s tourism marketing budget was reduced during Covid-19 and compares poorly with the tourism budgets of competitor destinations. Additional funds for tourism marketing would help to some extent undo some of the destination reputation damage caused by Omicron in 2021,” said Anderson.

She said there were several quick wins that would allow tourism to bounce back faster and create the hundreds of thousands of jobs SA desperately needed, such as:

• fixing the dysfunctional tourism vehicle licensing process, which has been delayed for several years; and
• resolving the liquor board stalemate, which has caused liquor licensing issues.

“Red tape and dysfunctional institutions need to be transformed into agile, professionally run entities which create an enabling environment for tourism and hospitality to do what it does best: create jobs. These measures will go some way to help tourism deliver on its promise as SA’s new gold, Mr President.”

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