Urgent call for safety measures to protect Nelson Mandela Bay’s Tourism sector.

The need for an urgent safety intervention in and around Nelson Mandela Bay’s tourism hot spots must be a top priority. One Voice, a tourism collective that represents the member-driven tourism bodies in the Metro, protested on the beachfront and handed a memorandum to a representative of the Speaker’s office of the Nelson Mandela Municipality. 200 members of the tourism industry met to demand that the negative spiral in the Metro’s second largest employer be elevated to a top priority and acted upon within weeks.

Safety is the largest element that handicaps efforts to reach the tourism potential in the Metro and is the main cause of the extremely poor international visitor recovery since COVID. The Metro recover percentage is half of the national average and had led to the loss of thousands of jobs and the closing of many businesses.

Extra-ordinary measures are required to bring back the confidence of tourists, visitors, tour operators, event organisers and all who are involved in bringing tourism to our Metro. We require an urgent and coordinated response to maximise the focus of people, resources and partnerships to respond to the current situation.

The One Voice group of tourism member-based organisations in Nelson Mandela Bay petitioned the Speaker’s Office to acknowledge and lead an intervention.

The One Voice grouping believes strongly that:
• A tourism crisis exists and will get worse unless an urgent Action Plan is created that declares tourism safety to be the top priority for the Municipality and its fellow law enforcement agencies.
• There are both community and economic aspects to safety.
• We acknowledge the dire social need for the deployment of safety resources to the community areas of the Metro.
• We, however, believe that the economic impact caused by the crisis in tourism raises this to being the top priority for the Metro.
• Tourism is the second largest employer in Nelson Mandela Bay and these jobs have a major effect on the wellbeing of our communities.
• By way of perspective, one tourism job is created for every 18 international visitors.
• Tourism is the most significant pro-poor sector and majority of those employed in tourism come from our community areas.
• Every rand spent by tourists generates another R2 of spending in the non-tourism businesses throughout the Metro.
• Nelson Mandela Bay’s percentage recovery from 2019 is little more than half of the national average for international visitors.
• This has cost our Metro thousands of jobs and the downward spiral of visitor numbers is resulting in further job losses.
• The main contributor to the sluggish recovery and continued job losses is the safety & security incidents in our tourism areas.

Every mugging, hijacking and scam of our tourists results in damaging social media posts shared thousands of times and affects the perceptions of our potential future visitors. In the minds of these prospects, perception equals reality (whatever we think of some of those posting) and the tourism tour operators are the same. The positive or negative reputation of a destination gathers momentum and causes more and more job and business losses. Nelson Mandela Bay is currently in this negative spiral.

Organisations such as the Beachfront Safety Forum, Neighbourhood Watches, Discover Mandela Bay, the Nelson Mandela Bay Business Chamber, tourism establishments and others have made a huge difference with cameras that are monitored by control rooms, solar lighting, MOU’s between national, provincial, regional and local authorities, and other initiatives. The Metro is rolling out their cameras and SAPS are doing their best while the long wait continues for a dedicated SAPS Tourism Unit that is nationally funded. The 2022 Summer Season Safety Initiative showed what could be done when tourism is prioritised, and public private partnerships focus passionately on safety. Not a single tourist incident was reported during those 6 weeks. This is what could be achieved throughout the year.

Despite all of these initiatives, for example, 5 delegates from 4 recent conferences were stabbed. Social media spreads the news of these extremely disturbing incidents and both delegates and their social media contacts become our detractors rather than our promoters. This is made even worse by the strong possibility that conference & event organisers will not bring events to the Metro again.

So, the tourism industry’s appeal is to dramatically escalate the urgency and top prioritising of tourism safety in the tourism hot spots of the Metro. The City Manager needs to drive a strategy where an extraordinary and unconditional series of actions are implemented by the end of October and continue for 12 months of each year. Tourism business has demonstrated its willingness to work with government partners and be part of both the planning and implementation.

The One Voice message from this demonstration is simple. Our communities need to keep their jobs and others need employment. The downward spiral of tourism in the Metro involves the potential loss of thousands of jobs.

Nothing short of a concerted intervention from the City Manager and the various Municipal departments is needed to solve this problem. One Voice represents, amongst others, DMB, FEDHASA, HistScoPE, PEMBBA, SAACI, SATAVITO, SATSA, Skal, TGAMB, SACIA and the Metro Tour Guides organisation.