Many countries closed to SA travellers
THE Tourism Ministry says it is engaging with international markets to educate them about the 501Y.V2 variant, after the country opened for international travel.
While some of South Africa’s airports have opened for international travel, travel agents have said that several countries are not allowing South African travellers entry, due to fear of the 501Y.V2 variant, which was first identified by South African scientists.
Tourism Ministry spokesperson Hlengiwe Nhlabathi-Mokota said the department was engaging across sectors and international markets to educate them about the variant.
“We are also continuing with campaigns to promote travel domestically, while marketing South Africa as a destination of choice – with unique experiences and attractions,” she said.
For example, Nhlabathi-Mokota said the Government Communication and Information System hosted a webinar last week entitled “Africa’s Webinar on Leading Communications during Epidemics in Africa”.
Kim Taylor, the customer experience director of the Flight Centre Travel Group, said South Africans were still subject to global travel restrictions and travel bans in place by different countries.
Anyone travelling to South Africa was also subject to entry requirements, she added.
Responding to The Mercury during a briefing last week, Home Affairs Minister Aaron Motsoaledi said the UK and the USA had banned entry for South Africans.
Motsoaledi, however, said he did not have the full list of countries that had banned South African travellers. The department did not respond to requests for the list last week.
Travel consultant Fatima Ahsan, from One Stop Travel and Tours, said most countries that South Africans commonly travelled to were not allowing travel from South Africa.
“Only Zanzibar, the Maldives and Egypt have opened their borders to South Africa and do not have quarantine
restrictions,” she said.
Ahsan said a few other countries that did allow travel from South Africa required travellers to quarantine for 14 days, and many people were not willing to spend 14 days in quarantine.
Jennifer Morris, the owner of Travel Savvy, said African countries belonging to the Southern African Development Community were open to South Africans with little or no restrictions including, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, Malawi, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
The island nations of the Maldives and Zanzibar Islands were also open for South African travellers.
She added that all of Asia, Europe, Canada, South America, USA, UK and Middle East were still closed to South Africans.
Taylor said any individual departing from South Africa would need to adhere to the entry requirements of the country they wished to visit.
“Since mid-January, various countries have prevented entry to passengers
travelling from South Africa in light of the newly detected Covid-19 variant,” said Taylor.
As a result, she said, many airlines adjusted their flight schedule or cancelled their flights for a period.
Taylor further explained that while South Africa had moved to level 1, international travel would remain complex for some time.
She said the group predicted that, in the corporate space, travel numbers would stabilise once a vaccine against Covid-19 was more widely available.
“For the next two years, our projection is that corporate travel will recover to 60% of pre-pandemic levels, by June 2022,” said Taylor.
Speaking on SAfm following the move to level 1, Tourism Business Council of South Africa chief executive Tshifhiwa Tshivhengwa said vaccination was a priority and key to the recovery of the tourism sector, in order to attract international visitors.
He said if the vaccination roll-out around the country was not implemented
correctly, it would problem for the sector.
“It’s important that vaccination is prioritised and that South Africa gets as many doses as possible, so that the world sees us as a secure destination to get more people from the international markets visiting us,” said Tshivhengwa.
The council expected an increase in tourism over the Easter period, he added.
Tshivhengwa said the sector was working on stimulating demand to make sure people wanting to travel were able to do so safely.
“For us to recover, travelling is essential because our business is travel and we have proven, over the past few months, that this can be done safely,” he said.
Speaking at a seminar on tourism, hosted by the eThekwini Municipality last week, John Aritho, who is chair of the Tourism Business Forum, said looking at trends globally, destination popularity would depend on how the country or region controlled the virus
create a
and the vaccination levels.
“This is something that we would like to raise with the city, in terms of how we are seen to be controlling the virus and the roll-out of the vaccination,” said Aritho.
FROM the rubble of a ruined church, Pope Francis led prayers for victims of war in Iraq’s battle-scarred city of Mosul yesterday, as part of an historic visit intended to bring solace to a Christian community that the Islamic State militant group tried to wipe out.
Francis addressed congregants against a backdrop of destruction: The church from which he spoke was once used as a jail by Islamic State militants and later destroyed in a US-led coalition airstrike. “Today we raise our voices in prayer to Almighty God for all the victims of war and armed conflict. Here in Mosul, the tragic consequences of war and hostility are all too evident,” Francis said in a soft voice.
The final full day of Francis’s trip through Iraq, the first to the country by a pope, was marked by contrast – the leader of the Roman Catholic Church coming to an area that only four years earlier was controlled by a terrorist group that killed religious minorities and vowed in its propaganda to “conquer Rome”, symbolic of the Christian West.
For Francis, the prayer in Mosul is likely to become one of the lasting images of his papacy: a moment when a global leader arrived in a broken place after much of the world’s attention had turned away from it. The pontiff already had a reputation for risky travel – a Rio de Janeiro slum, a war zone in the Central African Republic – but this time it was his message as much as the shattered setting that made it memorable.
“Hope is more powerful hatred,” he told the crowd.
In his first two stops yesterday, both in territory formerly controlled by the Islamic State, the pope was welcomed by jubilant crowds. “Our gathering here today shows that terrorism and death never have the last word,” Francis said at midday, speaking to a church community in Qaraqosh.
As night fell and he wrapped up his trip, Francis told a packed audience in Irbil, the capital of the autonomous Iraqi region of Kurdistan, that the scenes he had witnessed here would stay with him.
He urged Iraqis to “work together in unity for a future of peace and prosperity that leaves no one behind and discriminates against no one”.
In the aftermath of the Islamic State’s defeat, much of northern Iraq is far from recovered. Disputes between Sunnis, Shia and Kurds over territory than and ideals still simmer. More than a million people remain displaced. The militant group has been pushed from its territory, but tiny pockets of loyalists work underground. Christians, under the threat of conversion and violence, have fled the region in droves – a dynamic that church officials hope Francis’s trip can help reverse.
Security forces fanned out through Mosul and beyond yesterday, a reminder that threats remain even if Iraq is no longer at war. A highway to Qaraqosh had turned into a surreal mix of herders, sheep and heavily armed soldiers standing lookout on grassy slopes.
The cathedral hosting Francis in Qaraqosh had been used by the Islamic State until 2016 as a shooting range. A priest at the church, Petros Sheto, said church members, returning after the militants’ defeat, found “everything destroyed – no sign of life at all”.
Francis’s trip is his first abroad since the coronavirus pandemic began, and he has used his time in Iraq to appeal for coexistence and an end to religious violence. On Saturday, he met privately with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the pre-eminent religious figure for Iraqi Shia, who rarely opens his door for global leaders, political or religious. The pontiff also convened an interreligious event in the southern plain of Ur, the purported birthplace of Abraham.
The visit has inspired pride across Iraq, with many seeing the tour as a rare moment in which their homeland is making headlines for a story not dominated by violence. But government preparations have also been criticised. Iraq’s infrastructure has been crippled by decades of corruption and neglect; ahead of the pope’s visit, authorities resurfaced roads along which he would be driven and planted flowers along thoroughfares he would see.
In an alleyway by Baghdad’s St Joseph’s church last week, Christian residents joked that they were happy with the pope’s arrival because it had provided Iraq’s government with the impetus to pave their streets.
Iraq’s Christian community has shrunk sevenfold in three decades – partly because of violent persecution – as hundreds of thousands have sought refuge elsewhere.
Yesterday, the last priest left in Mosul, the Reverend Raed Kallo, said that only 70 Christian families remained there.