Tag Archives: Andrew Boraine

Economic Development Programme to amalgamate Cape tourism bodies?

The planned Economic Development Programme (EDP), which was announced by Alan Winde, Western Cape Provincial Minister of Finance, Economic Development and Tourism, more than a year ago, could see the amalgamation of Cape Town Routes Unlimited and Cape Town Tourism.

In a report in Southern African Tourism Update, a new steering committee of seventeen members for the EDP is announced, which includes current Cape Town Routes Unlimited (CTRU) Chairman Peter Bacon, Protea Hotels Group’s Otto Stehlik, and Western Cape province head of Economic Development and Tourism Solly Fourie, with Minister Winde.  The role of the Steering Committee is to ‘guide the final design, implementation and launch of the EDP’. More specifically, the Steering Committee agreed that the EDP should seamlessly integrate all sectors of the Western Cape economy, it should ‘institutionalise’the partnership between government and business to create mutual accountability for the future of the economy’ of the province, it should guide business around shared goals, it should create an environment that is conducive to small and large business as well as attracting investment to the province, it should provide ‘economic and market intelligence’, and should monitor the performance of the economy.  Greater employment will also be addressed by this not-for-profit body. One of the specific aims of the EDP is to create ‘a single strategy and brand for the region’s economy’, says a media release issued by Minister Winde earlier this year.  The ‘Cape Town and Western Cape’ brand name was highly controversial when it was introduced at the inception of Cape Town Routes Unlimited.

The report states interestingly that ‘it is anticipated that the EDP will resolve the current duplication of marketing efforts by CTRU and Cape Town Tourism (CTT), resulting from a historical impasse between the province and the city, which funds CTT’.  When the Minister first announced the establishment of the EDP, and his desire to amalgamate all economic and tourism related bodies in the Western Cape, Cape Town Tourism expressed its vehement opposition to the EDP, and declared its independence.  The Minister has not mentioned Cape Town Tourism as one of the bodies to be amalgamated more recently, and Cape Town Tourism has also not done so, just referring to its benefit for the province in general at its recent AGM.  Even more interesting as that Cape Town Tourism’s legal advisor Mike Evans of Webber Wentzel referred blatantly, and out of context to the AGM proceedings, to the closing down of Cape Town Routes Unlimited, while he may have meant that the operations of the EDP would be incorporated into the EDP.

Winde has used the model of the London Development Agency for the EDP, and has appointed Cape Town Partnership CEO to lead a task team for the establishment of the EDP, which is to open its doors in April 2012. In September we wrote about the Economic Development Agency, its name at the time, and the list of eighteen Western Cape economic promotion bodies which are to be amalgamated into it, including Wesgro, the Cape Film Commission, Cape Town Routes Unlimited, and the Cape Town Fashion Council. There has been no mention of Cape Town Tourism as being one of the bodies since then.

Only through the amalgamation of both Cape Town Routes Unlimited and Cape Town Tourism can the current costly duplication of marketing Cape Town and the Western Cape be eliminated.  Whilst the City of Cape Town funds Cape Town Tourism, and the DA rules both the city and the province, it will be interesting to see if the City of Cape Town and Western Cape province can see the bigger picture and co-operate in pulling Cape Town Tourism into the body as well, for the benefit of a united tourism industry in the Cape. The proviso of course would be that the EDP should be run efficiently and along business principles.  The management of Cape Town Routes Unlimited has been a disaster, and is not a model for how the EDP should be run!  We call on the Minister to communicate in more detail with the tourism industry, to explain his plans with the EDP.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter:@WhaleCottage

Cape Town World Design Capital 2014 : ‘Live Design, Transform Life’!

It was announced earlier this morning, at the World Design Alliance Congress in Tapei, that Cape Town has won the bid for the title of 4th World Design Capital 2014.  Our congratulations go to the Cape Town Partnership, compilers of the 465-page Bid Book, who are in Taipei as part of a nine-person delegation representing the city.  The year-long accolade, the first for an African city, will see Cape Town hosting a series of design-related events in 2014, and should attract new visitors to Cape Town.

Accepting the honour on behalf of Cape Town, Mayor Patricia de Lille said that a city must be designed for and with its communities.    She pointed out that the year of World Design Capital 2014 co-incides with the 20th anniversary of South Africa’s democracy and freedom for all.  She also said that tourism was bound to benefit, as this had been the experience for other Design Capitals in the past.  The City of Cape Town spokesperson Pierre Cronje said on Kfm that it was a ‘wonderful inspirational award for the city of Cape Town’.

Writing in the Cape Argus yesterday, Cape Town Partnership MD Bulelwa Makalima-Ngewana said that making Finalist stage of the Bid, with Dublin and Bilbao, had already changed Cape Town. She writes that in compiling the Bid Book, she and her team had seen Cape Town ‘as a human system’. In compiling the design wealth of the city, she is confident that the private and public sectors will invest in design ‘as a tool to create the liveable Cape Town we strive for.‘  The Cape Town Partnership strives for every one of its citizens to have a house by 2030, and that economic opportunities are created for all its residents.  Economically, the new Cape Economic Development Partnership, convened by Cape Town Partnership CEO Andrew Boraine, is a ‘design project’ in itself, its goal being to maximise economic growth in the city, which will benefit employment.  She calls for the city’s design portfolio and innovation to be exported into Africa, alongside our wines and fruit.  She called for the creation of a ‘knowledge economy’ in the Cape.  She said that winning the Bid would not be ‘a pat on the back for producing aesthetically pleasing objects or monuments to design. Instead, it recognises and rewards the employment of design as a tool for change’.  She added that design must be used to uplift our society, improve the lives of the locals, and efficiently ‘deliver taps and toilets to societies’, to aid transformation.  Winning the Bid will create focus and set deadlines, she writes.  The Partnership hopes to grow Cape Town ‘into one of integration’, given its past as a ‘city of segregation’.  We have been critical of the premise of the Bid that design caused segregation in Cape Town, and that design must turn this around by creating integration.

Cape Town has more than 800 creative industries, it is estimated, and the Cape Town Partnership calls for an inventory of design industries of three years ago to be repeated.

Six design events will be implemented within one month in 2014, as part of the World Design Capital 2014 requirement.  The World Design Capital is awarded every two years.  The World Design Capital last year was South Korea, and the World Design Capital 2012 is Helsinki.  All three cities agreed, prior to the announcement of the winning city, to collaborate.  See the video which was presented for Cape Town as part of its bid.  The City will pay €160 000 to the International Council for Societies of Industrial Design, for the licencing fee to hold the title, says the City’s media release just received.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage

Cape Town Tourism: should it defend ‘apartheid’ Cape Town?

I am not politically-inclined, do not belong to a political party, nor do I vote.  I am concerned however when I see the word ‘apartheid’ dragged into tourism communication, either to Cape Town’s ‘benefit’ (e.g. the bid for Cape Town as World Design Capital 2014) or detriment.  I was surprised to see an article on Cape Town Tourism’s website, defending a particularly nasty article in The Observer (a Sunday UK paper with about 1,2 million readers), with a photograph taken from The Promenade in Camps Bay, about Desmond Tutu’s birthday (‘Desmond Tutu’s dreams for Cape Town fade as informal apartheid grips the city’).

The Observer writer David Smith focused on Archbishop Tutu’s birthday last Friday, celebrated in St George’s Cathedral, the ‘fortress of resistance to racial apartheid‘, as his opening shot!  The article is a lengthy tome of attack against Cape Town, for being the ‘cancer of injustice, racial segregation and bitter division’, for its contrast of ‘opera houses’ (sic), ‘literary festivals’ (sic), ‘internet entrepreneurs’, ‘luxury mansions’, and ‘prosperous California-style wine estates’. It states that ‘millions (sic) of tourists’ arriving in the city will see the ‘other’ Cape Town, with shacks, violence, poverty, and ‘non-white’, resulting in a Cape Town that ‘remains an apartheid city in all but name’, contrary to what Tutu stands for, speaks the article on his behalf. The rest of the article justifies this statement, going back to Jan van Riebeeck as the real architect of segregation.  President Zuma is quoted as having said earlier this year that Cape Town is a “‘racist’ place with an ‘extremely apartheid system (sic)’“.  The DA is labelled as ‘a front for the wealthy white elite’.  Andrew Boraine of the Cape Town Partnership has the closing word, quoting Tutu: ‘winning freedom is one thing – using it is twice as hard’. Heavy stuff indeed, and not for the faint-hearted to defend, especially not appropriate for the city’s tourism body to climb into the boxing ring for in our opinion, given only four incidental references to tourism:

*   Staff make up beds in 5-star hotel beds, and then come home to sleep on the floor

*   Staff cook the best meals for guests, and then live off a slice of bread

* ‘ Cape Town is largely for the benefit and entertainment of tourists’

*   Cape Town is the world’s top tourist destination

Had I been the guardian of the city of Cape Town, I would have:

*  Got Archbishop Tutu to speak for himself, and respond, in the unique and direct way only he can (he is not interviewed, and no quotes from him are mentioned, and neither is the Dalai Lama’s cancelled visit

*  Got our feisty Premier Helen Zille and Mayor Patricia de Lille to write the response, the latter’s appointment being an excellent counter to the article in itself.

*   pointed out that the hospitality industry has a Minimum Wage, currently R 2323 per month

*   countered that Cape Town has a population of 4 – 5 million residents that love living here, irrespective of their skin colour

*   corrected the information, in that there is only one opera house, and that one literary festival has taken place for the first time last month

*   highlighted that it is the tourists who have visited Cape Town and seen the reality of the haves and have-nots in our city, as one would see in every city in the world, even in London, and who have voted to give Cape Town the top tourism accolades.

*   highlighted the hospitality sector GM’s, sommeliers, restaurant managers, and other management staff, who have reached their professional positions, despite their past.

*  corrected the tourism arrival figure quoted

Instead, Cape Town Tourism CEO Mariette du Toit-Helmbold, mistakenly referring to the article being in The Guardian, wrote awkwardly about ‘the juxtaposition between Cape Town’s poor and wealthy communities’,and that the legacy of apartheid ‘is a disjointed physical landscape and economic society..‘, digging a terrible hole for herself and our city as she goes on to write that for many of Cape Town’s residents it is ‘not yet a great place to live’!  None of this has anything to do with tourism at all, and she is the wrong person to challenge a leading UK newspaper, and very clearly out of her depth in defending a past political system.   She writes that Cape Town will be ‘reimaging’ as a ‘more livable space for all‘.  She quotes the city’s World Design Capital 2014 bid, in ‘shedding light on sustainable design’. Mrs Helmbold does get to tourism in her reply, highlighting the size of the industry and its employment of 300000 staff (no source supplied). She writes that the City of Cape Town, with the tourism industry, has embraced ‘Responsible Tourism’, in that tourism ‘creates better places for people to live in, and better places to visit’.  She concludes that ‘tourism is the lifeline to livelihood”.

I wrote to Mrs Helmbold yesterday, asking her why she had responded, and if she had sent her reply to the newspaper. This was her response:“Cape Town Tourism, as industry association and destination marketing agency for Cape Town, will respond from time to time as appropriate on issues that could affect our industry and/or destination brand. It is important to illustrate the positive role and contribution of tourism to Cape Town’s economy and the commitment from tourism to contribute to making Cape Town a more livable city through embracing responsible tourism principles and practices. We have submitted our response directly to the Guardian (sic) and posted a copy on our industry website where we can direct industry queries about the article. The Guardian has not yet published our response”.

One hopes that Cape Town Tourism’s response is not published in The Observer, and that the tourism body will invite the journalist to Cape Town, to personally showcase the great opportunities in tourism being afforded to all its citizens.

POSTSCRIPT 15/10: We have received the following feedback from Lisa Harlow from the UK: Well I am a Times / Sunday Times reader and still agree with Nick! I wouldn’t worry too much about this report – quite typical of the Guardian and Observer. But more importantly was the fairly recent good coverage of South Africa in the Saturday Telegraph. However, recession still goes on in the UK, and this is more of a hurdle to overcome for tourism. Lets see how successful BA are with their extra Cape Town flights for the summer season…”

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage

Design faux pas embarrasses City of Cape Town Mayoral Tourism, Events and Marketing’s Pascoe

City of Cape Town Mayoral Committee Member for Tourism, Events and Marketing Grant Pascoe must feel like a prize fool, having had his name splashed in the Cape Times, on two consecutive days, about the faux pas of the threatened cancellation of the funding support for the Design Indaba and Cape Town Fashion Week.  After a major outcry, the City has reversed its decision.

On Monday it was reported that the ’embarrassment‘ and ‘possible PR nightmare’ caused by the City’s funding cut of these two prime events could be a serious threat to the bid by Cape Town for World Design Capital 2014, especially given that respected Design Indaba founder Ravi Naidoo had been on the presentation programme for the Design Capital judges’ visit.  Valuable tourism income generated as a result of the Design Indaba, which sees the world’s leading designers coming to Cape Town to attend the annual conference linked to the Design Indaba, was threatened by the funding cut, as it was planned to move Design Indaba to Johannesburg as a result.  Intervention was made by the Cape Town Partnership, compilers of the 18-month long World Design Capital 2014 bid for Cape Town, addressed to Mayor Patricia de Lille, calling the funding cut a ‘possible crisis’.  “Just as we are preparing the final push for World Design Capital 2014, and literally drafting the mayor’s speech for Taipei on 26 October, the city seems to be sending out the message that it is cancelling its support for design and creative industries”, Cape Town Partnership CEO Andrew Boraine wrote.  R700000 is allocated to the Design Indaba annually by the City.  ‘Inspiration’, and linked to it design and creativity, are the pillars of Cape Town Tourism’s new positioning for Cape Town.

Yesterday the Cape Times reported that the red-faced Pascoe blamed the funding cut on a ‘misunderstanding about the city’s sponsorship of the Design Indaba and Cape Town Fashion Council (or Fashion Week)’, and stated that the City would find funding for both the events.  Letters announcing the funding cuts had been sent to the two design bodies ‘in error’, and have now been withdrawn, he is quoted as saying, with an apology from the City for the confusion caused.  He did, however, add that the full events portfolio will be reviewed in the next two months, to ‘bring them in line with the (unexplained) city’s mandate‘.

The Design Indaba and Cape Town Fashion Week have been estimated to contribute more than R500 million to the economy of Cape Town.

One hopes that Pascoe will review the effectiveness of the City of Cape Town’s R40 million expenditure by Cape Town Tourism too, some of which appears to be going to sponsoring wasteful events with dubious tourism benefits for the city, and the appointment of Australian ‘Strategetic Consultants’ to help it do its marketing work. Pascoe has declined all correspondence from ourselves on this topic by e-mail, has not returned phone calls, nor has he reacted to Twitter messages, making one wonder what interests he has to protect.

Chris von Ulmenstein, Whale Cottage Portfolio: www.whalecottage.com Twitter: @WhaleCottage