He is touted as the King of Green in the natural conservation arena and certainly has my vote as the most hands-on minister, but however impassioned he is about his portfolio, can Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism Mohammed Valli Moosa achieve true sustainability in his industry?
The phenomenal growth of South African tourism over the past three years has seen an ever-increasing number of international travellers visiting our shores. In response, the number of small-to-medium enterprises in the local tourism industry has boomed.
Moosa is committed to sustaining the development of tourism and has spearheaded the move towards community-based projects that uphold the ethic of tourism being “everybody’s business”.
At the recent opening of the new Muldersdrift Business and Information Centre and the Crocodile River Ramble, he spoke about the value of such projects, and the upliftment they provide for rural people.
However, according to Michael Gardner, director of the Sustainable Tourism Research Institute of Southern Africa, the sad fact is that community tourism projects rarely, if ever, get off the ground, and when they do, they rarely survive — let alone prosper.
Gardner says that the business acumen needed to identify marketable resources, draw up proper business proposals, apply for funding and launch a project is usually lacking in the community itself, and is more often than not provided by private sector support.
This kind of support sustains a project and helps it to gain momentum, but the true test of a project’s sustainability comes when it has to stand on its own and prove its viability without outside involvement.
“True sustainability of community-based tourism projects is rare,” says Gardner. “Viability is a key problem. There are lots of good ideas out there, but a good idea doesn’t always guarantee success when it comes to marketing and sales.” He adds that most, if not all of South Africa’s successful community-based tourism projects have effective NGOs or industry partners behind them. To what extent these can be called true community operations is therefore open to question.
According to Gardner it is easy to sell the idea of tourism enterprises to disadvantaged communities, but to educate people about how the industry works is another thing entirely.
“How do you explain the concept of market forces to an elderly woman who has spent her entire life in a rural village? How do you tell someone that tourists aren’t going to travel 38km down a dirt track to look at a rock their community holds sacred?” he asks.
Where does this put Moosa? In theory, his move to bring tourism home to South Africa’s rural settlements works, but in practice it’s a different matter entirely, and one full of pitfalls and frustrations.
Funding, or rather access to it, is the first hurdle. Moosa has made it available through organisations such as the Tourism, Hospitality and Sport Education and Training Authority (Theta).
But herein lies the problem, says Gardner, in that it is more or less inaccessible for those it is supposed to help. “The forms are a minefield,” he says of the paperwork needed for tourism training and project funding through Theta.
“You are presenting this mass of paperwork to villagers who are mostly illiterate, but who have a viable tourism project. They haven’t got a clue about what to do with the forms and so ask for help with completing them. Then you sit down with them and go through the forms and find that you don’t know where to begin. You need a business plan, a financial proposal — things a rural community has no conception of. The money is sitting there and you can’t access it,” explains Gardner.
So what’s the answer? Where is Moosa going wrong? Is he going wrong? He isn’t, but his cultural “greenness” and promotion of sustainable tourism, while laudable, aren’t translating into the kind of unfettered access to key tools required to make community-based tourism projects not only sustainable, but successful.
Gardner says a mechanism needs to be put in place to secure efficient education, training and funding of our rural communities in their endeavour to be part of South African tourism.
Trusts need to be established to help manage the funds and develop efficient marketing strategies. Partnerships rather than sponsorships need to be encouraged in the private sector, with firm structures in place to ensure a spread of profits in the participating communities.
So while Moosa has his foot firmly on the road to transformation in tourism, it is a long road and the destination is still some distance away.
Ultimately, while being green is one thing, making green is another.