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Brighton Gumbo Business Reporter
TOURISM and Hospitality Industry Minister Walter Mzembi says opening the borders through scrapping visa requirements and adoption of information communication technology are key towards increasing tourism earnings. Travel restrictions and poor immigration services characterised by long queues and poor customer care at the ports of entry, hinder tourism growth, he said.
“We’ll not have a visa in SADC, but it’ll not just be this region, it’ll be the whole of Africa, the consolidation of which will be a visa less or visa free Africa. But we must win the security war,” Mzembi told Parliament last week.
“Now, you can’t access an electronic border with a manual paper. So it means we’ll have electronic borders, electronic passports and electronic visas by year 2020.”
He said the region was undertaking several projects aimed at curbing queues at ports of entry.
The Zimbabwe-Zambia Univisa facility, signed between the two neighbouring countries in December last year, is a success case in point.
The minister said the second pilot project would involve three other countries, Namibia, Angola and Botswana with the third phase involving the entire SADC region.
He said the continent needs to convince the security sector on the need to facilitate free movement without undermining aggression threats. “It’s the security people who have restraints about free movement of people. We must convince them that it’s possible to process people on entry, but terrorist threats in the world aren’t helping this fight,” said Mzembi.
“So you find where we’ve made sufficient progress like in the East African Community, Alshabaab threat to Kenya has forced them in the last fortnight, to reverse those gains that they had registered in the last five years.
“They can’t just admit people freely anymore because of the terrorist and security threat.”
Mzembi stressed the need to strike a balance to facilitate a win/win situation for both security and tourism interests.
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