by the Minister of Environmental Affairs and Tourism, Mohammed Valli Moosa
Johannesburg, 14 October 1999
Ministers from Mozambique and Swaziland,
My colleague the Minister of Health from South Africa,
Distinguished guests,
Ladies and gentlemen.
It is my great honour to welcome you here today for the signing of a protocol that will change the lives of the people of our three countries.
This protocol is the result of work that our three countries have done in the trilateral Lubombo Spatial Development Initiative, a ground-breaking programme of co-operation initiative that put the focus on development in a region characterised by poverty and unemployment.
The mandate of this SDI was to unblock the impediments to development in the northern KwaZulu-Natal, southern Mozambique and eastern Swaziland area.
Any one who has travelled these areas will tell you of their vast beauty and natural resources. But historically they have remained underdeveloped and our task has been to tackle, one by one, the impediments to development.
The first problem was access.
Today a road from Hluhluwe to Maputo is under construction with immediate benefits to the local communities. Since President Mandela turned the first sod in August 1997, in excess of 50% of the work on this public works project has been taken up by small businesses led by local entrepreneurs.
The new national road comes with improvements to a number of secondary roads that will provide access to many of the villages that have been cut off from development opportunities and health services in the past.
The new rebuilt border post at Kosi Bay is now open, streamlining cross-border movement from northern KwaZulu-Natal to southern Mozambique coast. Agreement has been reached between Swaziland and Mozambique to re-open the Siteki-Goba border post, reviving a favoured route to Maputo in 1960s.
The three countries will be offering 19 new tourism sites that will offer unique and rewarding investment opportunities. In addition secondary tourism and agriculture related projects in South Africa valued in excess of R750 million are either being implemented or planned by communities, the private sector and government.
But there is another impediment in this area that will not go away without a systematic programme of elimination: that is, ladies and gentlemen, the potentially lethal disease malaria.
When President Mbeki addressed the recent World Economic Summit in Durban, he said that travel and tourism are one of the ways in which we can create the African Renaissance.
But for this to happen we have to deal with issues of risk - risk to people and risk to investment.
The risk in the Lubombo region is a small insect known as the Anopheles mosquito.
If we look back in our history we can get a more accurate idea of the devastating consequence of this disease. In 1932 all the districts of KwaZulu- Natal Province, bar one, reported a serious epidemic of malaria which took more than a decade to control.
During that time in the sugar industry which was the economic life-blood of that province:
Control measures in the past have had some success but today we face a resurgence of this lethal disease.
Scientists and medical researchers are now predicting that after a relatively warm winter, we may be facing the worst malaria outbreak in the region since 1932 as we approach summer with a greater number of mosquitoes which will breed and exponentially increase the risk of disease.
And the Lubombo region (that is southern Mozambique, eastern Swaziland, and northern KwaZulu Natal) will be at the heart of the predicted epidemic.
This threat comes, as South Africa is enjoying the biggest and most prolonged tourism boom in its history.
1998 marked the 12th successive year of increased overseas visitor arrival with a compound growth rate of 19% over the past 5 years.
The growth in foreign arrivals comes on top of a large and well-established domestic tourism market that is currently worth twice as much as its foreign counterpart.
The World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC) estimates that, in total, tourism now contributes about R53-billion annually to the South African economy, and it expects this to grow at around 12% annually - to reach R211-billion by 2010.
It is for these sound economic reasons that government has targeted tourism as the one economic sector that has the potential to tackle the biggest single economic and social problem in the region: unemployment.
At the jobs summit, hosted last year a number of programmes were adopted to use tourism as a way of fast-tracking job creation. The Lubombo Spatial Development Initiative was one of these projects.
But we all know that malaria can have very serious negative impacts on tourism. Only this time - unlike in 1932 - we are prepared.
We have a detailed plan and programme to deal with malaria and it will not take 16 years, like it did back then in the 1930s.
The governments of Swaziland, Mozambique and South Africa have come up with a pro-active plan that cuts across our borders to fight a disease that knows no borders.
It is with great pleasure that I welcome you here today to witness the start of a five-year programme which will result in the eastern past of South Africa, eastern Swaziland and southern Mozambique being a malaria-free zone.