If vision were all there was to consider, one would not fault him on anything. As the Tourism Minister, there is no disputing the fact that he wants Zimbabwe to regain its status as a hub of commercial recreation.
His problem, though, is that he tends to be too excitable and naïve at times. While his vision is good, the strategies, methods and projections leave a lot to be desired.
Wind back to the period running up to the 2010 soccer World Cup hosted by South Africa. Mzembi told each and every person who cared to listen that, come the popular tournament, enterprising Zimbabweans would reel under bags of money.
He claimed tourists coming to watch the World Cup would descend on this nation like flies. They would pack all the hotels like sardines and spend money as though their lives depended on it.
Consequently, people scrambled to build hotels, lodges and any other structures that they thought offered them a good chance of raking in the greenback. Others rushed to borrow money to buy taxis to cater for the anticipated influx of tourists. That is why Zimbabwe, particularly Harare, now has such a high volume of cabs.
As we know now, hardly any tourists ever thought of coming to Zimbabwe during the World Cup. The lodges and hotels built are starting to crumble and the taxis now have to battle for the common man’s business with commuter omnibuses, breaking the law left, right and centre in the process.
There is a lot of disillusionment, of course. Those who made tourism-centred investments ahead of the World Cup feel cheated. They were led down the garden path, clearly.
Now, the affable Mzembi is going to town about township tourism. He has been howling about how cultivating suburban destinations will help revive our ailing tourist industry. Of course, the idea sounds brilliant – but there is nothing new in his thrust, considering that tourists always used to visit the ghetto way back when.
Tourists from all over the world would make a beeline for Zimbabwe Grounds, Mbare and other high density communities of interest, especially in the period before 1999. They would also visit sculpture workshops and street markets in Chitungwiza and Highfield, among other places. That is township tourism.
So, when Mzembi starts talking about township tourism, he ought to have that background – there is no need to reinvent the wheel. While township, or “alternative”, tourism is a noble idea, Mzembi ought to ask himself whether what he is envisaging is sustainable, in the context of the politics that his party is so bent on.
The first question he should ask himself is: What happened to township tourism back then? There are certain things that need to be put in place before we can start exciting people about the viability of township tourism once again.
The political situation, since the turn of the century, has not been conducive to the kind of tourism that Mzembi is advocating. In the early 1990s, as a university student, I would take friends from outside Zimbabwe, mainly white, who came on exchange programmes, to Mbare, Highfields, Ruwa and other places without any problem.
No-one in the so-called townships raised an eyebrow, because visits to those areas by white people were such a commonplace thing. Today, Mzembi needs to be educated, it is almost impossible to do the same thing. It has become unimaginable for a black person to accompany a white friend to Mbare without risking life and limb at the hands of those gangsters called Chipangano.
Thanks to the rhetoric by President Robert Mugabe, being white-skinned makes one an automatic enemy of Zimbabwe. The only good white man is a dead one, as he said back then, not the one who takes a stroll around Mbare Musika, camera in hand, as a township tourist.
For as long as people are not disabused of this mentality, there will not be any township tourism to talk about in Zimbabwe, Comrade Mzembi. Without a paradigm shift in local politics, any idea of community tourism will remain a pie in the sky.
That leaves only local tourists to consider. It goes without saying that locals are not very keen on the idea of spending money to gawk at the houses that Robert Mugabe, Joshua Nkomo, Herbert Chitepo and other nationalists lived in during colonial days.
There is nothing monumental about those houses – they hardly stand out from the house next door. They don’t give any aura of history as they are as ordinary as any other shelter in the “townships”. Besides, why are we thinking of transforming them into museums today, more than three decades after independence? For feedback, please write to majonitt@gmail.com
Post published in: Opinions & Analysis