Tourism Department to blame for closure of Mzoli’s and other township small businesses

5 May 2021

The DA has noted the report by TimesLive confirming that the iconic Cape Town restaurant, Mzoli's Place, has closed its doors. The shisanyama has been a staple on Cape Town’s social scene and has been one of the latest victims of the Covid-19 pandemic and the ANC’s economic lockdown.

Mzoli’s is but one of many small businesses in the township tourism sector which have had to close their doors permanently. The decline should be laid squarely at the feet of the ANC government, who not only placed the nation on perpetual lockdown with irrational regulations, but also the Department of Tourism’s complete failure to provide adequate support to the sector.

This was confirmed in a recent meeting of the Tourism Portfolio Committee yesterday, in which officials confirmed that the Department is in reality doing nothing for small and medium enterprises (SMMEs) in the sector. The Department confirmed that the only assistance provided was the R200 million Tourism Relief Fund which had been made available to assist SMMEs in the tourism and hospitality sector that were under economic pressure due to travel restrictions during the Covid-19 lockdown.

The R1.2 billion Tourism Equity Fund, on the other hand, was created with the aim to improve participation of black South Africans in the tourism sector. However, this one-dimensional government solution ensured that only a selected number of elites, hand-picked by government, benefited. This, while the hundreds of thousands of tourism SMMEs obtained no assistance of any description.

Creating a new tourism elite who have connections to the governing party will do little to grow and develop the tourism sector and create jobs.

If government ensured that the basics were done, it would go much further than the limited elites that will benefit from extravagant assistance. Our tourism sector would grow faster and would ensure a more inclusive and growing sector if the various spheres of government improved and maintained tourism infrastructure, tourism sites and related infrastructure, such as the construction of roads to inaccessible or hard-to-reach tourism sites and access to water and electricity to tourism attractions.

By doing this, more people would be able to participate in the tourism sector without reliance of government funding which, based on this government’s performance, will be pilfered, lost by corruption and maladministration or distributed to those within the inner circle of the ANC. Incentives, such as training incentives to entrants in the sector and tax incentives as a relief to those hit hard during lockdown, would go much further.

Issued by Manny de Freitas, DA Shadow Minister of Tourism, 5 May 2021