Harare, Zimbabwe (News of the South)-The country’s underperforming economy is having negative effect on the tourism sector and government should work to change the situation lest the projected estimates of the sector leading as the country’s GDP earner in the 2015/16 season may fail according to a Minister.
The Ministry of Finance has projected the tourism sector to lead economic growth in the country by 4.1 ahead of both mining and agriculture.
Currently the sector is the second largest employer apart from the civil service with over 300 000 people.
Speaking to the Staff College class of 2016 in Harare Tourism Minister Walter Mzembi said there is need to deal with the other pillars of development such as governance, culture and heritage, investment and immigration and exports and not just isolate tourism.
“There is a laissez faire attitude from the treasury that tourism will simply progress on its own without any investments into the sector, that won’t work”, he said.
Mzembi said South Africa, which accounts for 29 percent of Africa’s tourism, invests more than 100 million to market its 10 billion dollar tourism industry.
“We need to invest in tourism in order to get quality, SA isn’t a big tourism payer by accident, they have invested in tourism and you find them at almost all international exhibitions so they have grown because of that”.
Minister Mzembi however condemned the local media for its persistent focus on the negative saying such kind of journalism is detrimental to the country.
“We have an acerbic media here that foments the kind of negativity which our detractors like so we need to fix the media narrative because headlines sell who we are”.
“Nowadays you fight images with images so we should agree as a people to put our best foot forward and that should be by projecting the right image”, he said.
Mzembi dissuaded the government from banning foreign media outlets from coming into the country saying that created unnecessary scenes and they should be left in to see for themselves since they were bound to report still even from outside.
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