While insiders say President Cyril Ramaphosa is likely to scrap the beach and booze ban in the next few days, it may already be too late to save many tourism companies.
“They’ve closed the beach, so some days, we just come here and get maybe R20, just for survival. It very difficult here, because of [the] lockdown,” one street vendor, Delyn Mera, told Al Jazeera, which broadcast a profile of SA’s crumbling tourism industry at the weekend.
It’s an important counter to the portrait painted by many in the government of how the beach ban — now in its sixth, inexplicable week — really only robbed the idle rich of a tan. The truth, as Al Jazeera showed, is that the ban rippled down to many of the 300,000 people who rely,…