Shooting tourists in the foot Minister Walter Mzembi
Minister Walter Mzembi

Minister Walter Mzembi

Perspective Stephen Mpofu
We, Zimbabweans, badly need them as do other competing nations in this region and farther abroad. But can you guess what?

With head in the sand, like an ostrich, or driven by a get-rich-quick instinct we shoot in the foot as it were, international tourists who ought to lay their golden eggs in our country and they instead fly to countries with a more conducive tourism environment and drop their precious eggs there, while we wring our fingers to bemoan our losses.

That is the sad, even tragic story of the heavy taxes levied against tourism operators, thereby making travelling to Zimbabwe more expensive as a tourism destination when compared with other countries.

This lament is by no other tourism authority than Zimbabwe’s own Walter Mzembi, the Minister of Tourism and Hospitality Industry.

Cde Mzembi was reported in this newspaper earlier this week as saying that a study by the Zimbabwe Council of Tourism had shown that facilities in this country were 30 to 40 percent more expensive than those in countries competing for the same tourists.

As a result Zimbabwe became a less preferred tourism destination for some adventure-seekers. The good news, however, according to Cde Mzembi, is that the government is considering reducing or completely removing the prohibitive taxes to make Zimbabwe a preferred tourism destination regionally and globally.

He also spoke of the need for Zimbabwe and other African countries to liberalise their skies in such a way as to promote intra-African travel, with a speedy removal of visa requirements, replacing them with e-visas, and issuing visas to tourists on arrival in each country as shown by a successful uni-visa pilot project between Zimbabwe and Zambia.

This pen strongly believes that if the stumbling blocks sited above were removed Zimbabwe would hold its own in the highly competitive tourism trend, what with the world-famous Victoria Falls.

Mosi-oa-Tunya, which in the language of the Toka-Leya means the smoke that thunders, has been for years a popular tourist attraction for both international and local visitors. The Toka-Leya led Scottish missionary explorer David Livingstone to the Falls, who then “discovered” and named the mighty falls after the then British monarch, Queen Victoria. Zambia’s Livingstone town was named after the Scottish missionary.

Abutting the falls, Victoria Falls and Zambezi National Parks refuse to be shoved in the shade boasting, as it does game in its natural habitat, the wild. This is unlike in other countries’ parks such as in East Africa, for instance, where game pause smiling beside bush tracks for video cameras shot by tourists.

Besides, an international requiem sparked recently by the senseless slaughter of a rare black-maned lion named Cecil by an American dentist and his local Zimbabwean associates has drawn Hwange National Park into sharper world focus so that more tourists must now be itching to set foot in that park if only to satiate their curiosity about wild animals that abound in the park.

Then there is this other world-renowned place — Great Zimbabwe, a former seat of government for the Rozvi Empire. No doubt foreigners, particularly historians and/or their students would want to know what the great enclosure and other historic structures at that tourist destination look like.

Not to be left out is the Matopos National Park, named after the hills bearing the same name and made famous worldwide by British imperialist Cecil John Rhodes whose remains were interred at the Matopos. This country was in its colonial days named after Rhodes when it was previously known as Southern Rhodesia while Zambia was Northern Rhodesia.

Still another tourist magnet for Zimbabwe is to be found in the dizzy heights of this country’s own “Kilimanjaro”, or Mount Nyangani.

You scale the mountain to its summit, peer over the vast stretches of Mozambique on the other side of our border and turn round to look breathtakingly at hills and valleys dwarfed by Nyangani on our side of the border as Nyanga holds out its hand beckoning to the rest of the world to come, relax and go back home re-invigorated both in health and in the spirit.

This pen also believes strongly that Zimbabwe’s literacy rate, at 91 percent, the highest on the continent should now be promoted as a commodity for international tourists to sample.

Surely, many foreigners wish to know what such a highly literate people are like in behaviour and in their interaction both among themselves and with foreign visitors.

Granted, those tourists who have previously visited some of the country’s tourist spots and cities have spoken highly of the “hospitality” of our people, but more foreigners no doubt wish to be acquainted with the lives of locals who live not only in the centre or urban areas, but with the vast majority of our people in the periphery, or communal lands.

If the country’s tour operators, mainly holed up in the cities, take foreign visitors deeper into the countryside, functional literacy — which means relating reading and writing to practical work especially among the elderly — Zimbabwe’s top literacy rating will complete a picture to the rest of the world of what Zimbabweans have become in the 35 years of independence from oppressive white rule.

And anyway, why not also promote land reform out in the country as a tourist attraction to try to vanquish a notion widespread abroad that the black government seized land driven by nothing other than sheer greed.

Land allocated to peasants, who previously eked out existence from small and sometimes barren land, scratching the soil like chickens to keep soul and body together, will prove to all and sundry that land reform was meant to make equal opportunities for the betterment of the have-nots previously outpaced by the haves.

Moreover, foreign tourists going deeper into the countryside will also sample some of Zimbabwe’s traditional cuisines such as macimbi/madora in rich peanut butter in some areas or barbecued mice in other areas. These are just a few of many tribe-specific dishes. Now don’t you (yes, you) frown because this pen and other Zimbabweans who have traversed the world will tell you that back home in their native countries some of the sophisticated foreign visitors you have encountered eat frog legs and crabs, which are delicacies in their countries.

Moreover, to know a people completely one needs also to be acquainted with their diet among other things.

Mzembi also called for the promotion of domestic tourism for a further growth of the industry. It is not untrue that many Zimbabweans both in the urban and rural areas know very little beyond their backyards in as far as the way other indigenous people live, not to mention places of interest that foreigners patronise in greater numbers.

Perhaps local tour operators should start by organising trips at weekends for workers to places of interest, followed by larger numbers of school children, in both cases at affordable rates.

Such educational trips for schools will sow the seed for greater adventures for the children in public life, while workers will no doubt eventually take their spouses and children for relaxation to places of interest.

Zimbabweans from different places interacting at tourist destinations will benefit from an exchange of experiences and knowledge about how they live and do things while the learning of different indigenous languages would provide not only for better communication but also for cooperation, amity and national tranquility.

 

You Might Also Like

Comments