Beware of good intentions

A HOLIDAY in South Africa should be an easy sell, offering pleasures from lion-watching and diving with sharks to sipping Pinotage in front of breathtaking mountain views. With the rand at record lows, South Africa is cheerfully cheap to visit, too, for travellers with dollars or euros in their pockets. But the government’s stubborn adherence to new immigration rules is hurting tourism just when the economy needs a boost.

The new rules, which came into force in June, require minors to carry “unabridged birth certificates” when entering or leaving South Africa: an unusual requirement, since usually a passport will do. Although this is meant to prevent child-trafficking, it discourages family holidays. If children travel with only one parent, the written consent of the other is also required.

Under separate rules, visitors from countries requiring visas, including China, must apply in person at a South African mission in their home country so that biometric data may be taken, rather than on arrival, the easier option offered in many other countries. This forces the many tourists from China to make a long and costly trip to Beijing, Shanghai, or two other visa offices more recently opened.

As widely expected, many prospective visitors are simply choosing to go elsewhere. Foreign tourist arrivals for April were down 11% against a year earlier, according to Statistics South Africa. Chinese tourism has been especially hard-hit, down by 45% in 2014 compared with 2013. A study by Grant Thornton, commissioned by the Tourism Business Council of South Africa, said the country’s tourism industry lost 886m rand ($82m) in direct spending last year because of the new visa regulation—as well as other factors, including fears that Ebola might spread from west Africa. It estimated that South Africa would lose 100,000 tourists this year, translating into 1.4 billion rand in lost tourist spending.

Malusi Gigaba, the home affairs minister, has doggedly pursued the new regulations despite criticism from many quarters, including his government’s own tourism minister. Arguing for the “unabridged birth certificate”, his officials say that 30,000 children are trafficked in South Africa every year, though the ministry itself has recorded only 23 cases in the past three years. Mmatsatsi Ramawela, CEO of the tourism council, talks of a “standoff” between industry and the ministry.

So South Africa’s frustrated tour operators cheered when President Jacob Zuma recently admitted his “concern” about the “unintended consequences” of the new rules. He announced a ministerial committee under his deputy, Cyril Ramaphosa, dubbed “Mr Fix-It”, to try to solve the mess. But it is unclear how soon the changes may be made or how much damage will have been done by then.

The unintended consequences come at a bad time for South Africa; the economy shrank by an unexpected 1.3% (annualised) in the second quarter. Solidarity, a labour union, says 60,000 jobs will be lost this year, most of them in mining. Unemployment is already hovering around 35%. “This is more than just an ‘unintended consequence’,” says Mmusi Maimane, leader of South Africa’s main opposition party, the Democratic Alliance. It is, he says, “an economic catastrophe”.