4IR opportunities for EC tourism Prof Lungile Pepeta changed education
The fourth industrial revolution has brought a shift in the way technology, communications, data and analytics affect how we live, work and relate to each another.
Tourism has been identified as a key growth sector in SA because of its contribution to the country’s GDP. It is therefore important that the Eastern Cape seizes the exciting opportunity presented by the 4IR to develop the tourism sector.
Tourism was one of the first sectors to digitalise business processes when flight and hotel bookings were brought online.
As information and communications technology became a worldwide phenomenon, tourism was a consistent early adapter of new technologies and platforms.
Tourism stakeholders have successfully applied technology to enhance the traveller experience. Airports worldwide are introducing biometric technology to identify travellers and make their trips as frictionless as possible.
Artificial Intelligence allows hotels and travel agents to offer clients more personalised and tailored experiences.
The EC 2020 Tourism Master Plan is driven by several strategic thrusts guiding development of specific aspects of tourism in the province.
Despite the Eastern Cape being endowed with natural and cultural resources with high tourism potential, it has not yet been optimally exploited to generate significant economic growth and development. This could be attributed to issues of poor governance, capacity building and brain drain.
The province has potential to become a destination of choice for many more international tourists because of its rich combination of landscapes, beaches, and protected flora and fauna. However, tourism in the province needs to take advantage of 4IR and the exciting challenges it brings. — Lwazi Apleni, lecturer, Department of Recreation and Tourism, University of Zululand
Renaming SA’s 10th medical school at Nelson Mandela University after Professor Lungile Pepeta, who died on August 7, would be easy — the difficult path will be sustaining his vision for a higher education facility coexisting and engaging with its surrounding community as well as generating the necessary competencies needed to take this vision further.
The latter might remain an aspiration given that Pepeta is irreplaceable. Yet, given his humble nature he would not want any of us to despair over his passing. He would want us to celebrate his life and take up the baton and move ahead with similar energy and grace.
In January 2017 Pepeta was appointed dean of the health science faculty at NMU and top of his agenda was the establishment of a medical school to be positioned as a resource for a holistic and integrated health care system fixated on community partnerships.
A paediatric cardiologist by training, Pepeta was a product of working-class communities of the Eastern Cape and spent his life publicly servicing the very same underprivileged communities that raised him.
While the medical profession can provide lucrative financial rewards and employment anywhere in the world — Pepeta chose to remain in the Eastern Cape.
It was these personal principles and professional values that translated into the mentoring qualities he disseminated to his students at NMU.
The medical school project that he leaves behind, located at the university’s Missionvale campus — is a township site that is close to Dora Nginza Hospital and community clinics.
It will be offering a preventive health care methodology rather than a curative application. This is a traditional philosophy of medical care that our precolonial communities espoused and is also utilised in Cuba.
For a community faced with poverty, unemployment and hopelessness, the presence of the medical school presents new streams of sustainable income and development through employment, the importing of skilled labour into the area and the retention of young talent.
Because the university is a public institution, its permanent presence in this community and the operation of its medical school makes for an ecosystem that is sustainable and an asset for the region. This is the kind of higher education model that Pepeta worked for — the construction of a university sector that utilises its outputs, resources and knowledges to engage, coexist and service its immediate society.
Such innovative approaches to learning, teaching, research and community engagement will generate a unique breed of students and professionals who will serve the communities of the EC. — Pedro Mzileni, lecturer, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Nelson Mandela University
The EC 2020 Tourism Master Plan is driven by several strategic thrusts guiding development of specific aspects of tourism in the province