It was interesting to read a critical article about the perceived extravagance and inappropriateness of a recent media lunch hosted by SA Tourism and Marthinus van Schalkwyk, our Minister of Tourism, in New York.

The article was posted on eTurboNews, but the writer is not identified.  Looking at the editorial panel of the online newsletter, one can assume it was written by Dr Elinor Garely, who is the only journalist for the newsletter based in New York.

Dr Garely writes that she had previously visited South Africa ‘many years’ ago, and Cape Town in particular, whilst she was working on her doctoral dissertation in international business.   Her overriding impression was the contradiction she saw then: ‘While the hotels were lovely, the restaurants for dining and tasting South African wines were world-class; it was the imbalance between wealth and poverty that overshadowed my enthusiasm‘. Her story about the media lunch is clouded by the memory of that visit to our country.

The media lunch was hosted at Le Bernardin, a top rated New York restaurant, at which Dr Garely was invited by SA Tourism PR company Coyne PR to a ‘small intimate lunch’.  She was shocked when she saw the menu of the restaurant and the prices of the dishes, and that the small group of guests she was expecting to find was in fact a party of about 100.  Immediately she translated the cost of the menu and the number of heads, remembering that ‘many South Africans earn less than $2.00 per day‘ – obviously this is completely inaccurate, as the minimum wage in most employment categories is four times that, at about $240 per month!

Even greater was her shock, she writes, that the function was held upstairs in the private room of the restaurant. She felt that she had arrived at a room that could be the ‘set for the Academy Awards‘!  She criticises that there were no name tags.  She insisted on meeting Minister van Schalkwyk personally for a ‘one-to-one‘. Finally she was given five minutes with the Minister, and one senses that she was not happy with this limited time. Bragging about the 1,2 million global readers of the newsletter, she writes glowingly about how other tourism ministers from Israel, Brussels, and Brazil, as well as other tourism officials from around the globe were willing to share the highs and lows of their position – obviously Minister van Schalkwyk did not!

The rest of her lengthy article is extremely odd, mainly lambasting our country on the basis of academic research, with no indication that Minister Van Schalkwyk added to her body of information about our tourism industry in South Africa:

*   she writes about our good quality food and wines, as well as good luxury hotels.  The quality of medical care and education is also praised.  This is all she finds to praise about South Africa, clearly based on her previous visit!

*  she criticises our country’s poverty, which she says leads to crime.

*  the number of South Africans living in squatter camps has grown by 33%, to more than 4 million in the past 18 years, leading to poor quality of life for those living in these areas.

*   unemployment is high at 25%, the sixth highest in the world.

*   the poor barely benefit from tourism in our country

*   tourism is not ‘an economic panacea‘, and can be unstable in times of economic downturn.