The Sunday Mail
On August 15 I bade farewell to my wife Barbara and our daughters at our gem, the Harare International Airport. I had no idea this trip to Ghana would be the most humbling journeys of my eventful life as Zimbabwe’s Tourism Minister and public relations champion.
Hon. Walter Mzembi
I am the guy who is supposed to smile and laugh off all the negative stereotypes about Brand Zimbabwe, real and unfounded, and bring in the much needed visitors. You see, a home without visitors is a cold one. And as my favourite Prophet Isiah instructs us in Chapter 60:11, we must “keep thy gates open 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year so we may enjoy the wealth of the Gentiles with their Kings in procession”.
Today’s Gentiles are the tourists! Fortunately, Zimbabwe’s natural attractiveness ranked by an annual desk top World Economic Forum Competitiveness Indices Report which I have followed religiously since deployment in February 2009, consistently ranks our country number 19 out of 148 countries. Still, an unfair score given that none of those countries has the Victoria Falls — a Natural Wonder of the World (one of the original seven), and can boast the “best climate rating”- not by our own scoring , but the World Climate Agency, a UN Specialized Organ.
Therefore, I spin this “unfair” rating as the “perception gap” which we have been fighting to close through marketing our nation. Unfortunately, tourism is just one of the pillars making up a nation brand — the others being governance, exports, investment and immigration, sports, arts, culture and heritage, and people, according to the Anholt’s Hexagon on Branding, a universal authority on the subject.
I am happy though that after successfully overseeing the formulation, design and implementation of our Tourism Sectoral Brand, now captured as “ Zimbabwe A World of Wonders”, and being the only remaining member of the Inclusive Government Cabinet Inter-Ministerial Taskforce on Nation Branding chaired by the then Deputy Prime Minister Arthur Mutambara, Government has mandated me to carry on with this task and has since institutionalised the intention by giving my Ministry a co-ordinating and technical formulation directorate on the same.
Riding on this mandate and our international obligations as UNWTO Commission for Africa chairperson, I have been part of the team that conceived “Brand Africa” as an agenda of our elected chairmanship assumed on the occasion of the historic 20th UNWTO General Assembly held in Victoria Falls in August 2013. We agreed to take the inaugural UNWTO Branding Summit to Accra, Ghana on August 17 2015 under the theme “Enhancing Brand Africa — Fostering Tourism Development”.
Looking through the window of SA 23, I couldn’t help justifying why I was flying this competitor airline, instead of our very own Air Zimbabwe. They fly under the pay off line “A tradition of caring”. I exclaimed “my foot” as I watched a seeming graveyard of four or five of our elegant birds grounded in a corner of the airport for one reason or the other, ranging from shortage of Jet A1, low load factors, to something, etcetera.
At OR Tambo there is yet another spectacle of a permanently parked Airbus 320 or something. Why? It is now a universally acknowledged fact that 51 percent of the global billion-plus arrivals do so by air.
We are celebrating 2015 World Tourism Day on September 27 under the theme “One Billion Tourists, One Billion Opportunities”. I reminded myself, the opportunity starts in the air, with the airline ticket and associated taxes in excess of 60 percent of the traveller’s budget!
And here I was sojourning on South Africa, joining the hundreds of Zimbabweans doing so weekly. We must plug this leakage, I concluded as we landed in Accra.
Now before I narrate what happened next, I want to take you two months back to my official visit to the DRC on the occasion of the signing of a bilateral memorandum of understanding on tourism co-operation, whose technical programme took me to a Bonobo Sanctuary National Park visit just on the outskirts of Kinshasa. This is the home to a primate called the Bonobo, a threatened monkey famous for many things. I was told of the Bonobos proximity to humans. True to their words, the monkeys easily mixes with people.
Their orphans are fostered by trained people who do this full-time as part of a conservation project to save the animals from extinction. The Bonobos have been threatened by forestry commercial activities and human consumption. When they fall sick, pharmaceuticals are dispensed to them. The female Bonobo has a menstrual cycle similar to that of human beings. However, it is famous for solving conflict by its unparalleled sexual generosity, taking up a minimum of five males at a time! So everyone is happy, satisfied and weirdly not jealousy of each other.
Anyway, its monkey-like features around the mouth and nose are the subject of my testimony.
On the morning of the 16th, l was feeling very tired from my flu and sore throat medication and the added fatigue of the eight-hour journey. I did my bedside prayers and my daily devotionals. As I read them, I was intrigued by the testament quoted underneath.
“Rest. It is wrong to force work. Rest until Life, Eternal life, flowing through your veins and hearts and minds, bids you bestir yourselves, and work , glad work, will follow. Tired work never tells. Rest. Remember I am your Physician, Healer of Mind and Body. Look for Me for cure, for rest , for Peace “
Therefore, I started the internal debate of whether to go on the technical trip of the day or not. I was supposed to visit the Akosombo Hydro Electrical Power Plant in the Volta River Authority, a Kwame Nkrumah inspired legacy 1 003MW power generation project as old as Ghana’s Independence. This trip would provide a useful benchmark in terms of power generation. I convinced myself that after this learning trip l would share my lessons with my colleagues back home. Therefore my final decision was to go.
As I boarded the Land Cruiser assigned to us (Dr Taleb Rifai, secretary-general UNWTO and the Ghana Minister of Tourism, Hon Elizabeth Ofosu-Adjare , our gracious host ), I sensed a high degree of painful numbness on my palms and feet. However, it was too late to back off from the 200km or so journey to the east of Ghana.
Two hours later we were at the power plant and were soon engrossed in technical interrogations to quench our thirst for knowledge. An hour later, a sumptuous Ghanaian cuisine was served. I could feel some pain and discomfort but I endured it honourably all the way back into the car to a site visit of the Royal Senche Resort, a four star replica of the Kingdom Hotel in Victoria Falls, situated on the West Bank of the Volta River, in the eastern region of Ghana. Along the way, l was awakened by a slight painful twitch on my mouth.
I quickly flipped opened the nicely folded vehicle mirror just ahead of me and Oh, my God! A caricature of a Bonobo was staring back at me in the mirror. I refused to accept that was me and started taking selfies just to be sure l was not dreaming.
I could not believe the sight and kept capturing the deterioration of my face on my cellphone until I couldn’t bear it alone. I woke up the two people at the back, who were totally horrified and started asking me all sorts of questions I couldn’t even answer. An hour later, l couldn’t recognise my face.
Limping, I stepped out of the vehicle to a grand welcome party organised by traditional chiefs and the hotel management who were so excited to have us there.
The hotel management showcased their new and sprawling asset and shared very proudly the Zimbabwean design and thatch roofing, not common in Ghana. The grass was shipped all the way from Zimbabwe! Our enterprising people who assisted in the construction of the project, especially the thatching, stayed six months in Ghana until the project was commissioned. Whilst marvelling at the exporting of this unbranded and unpatented skill, I was constantly reminded about how I had been completely de-branded in a matter of hours to the shock of everyone. My guests kindly and collectively diagnosed that it had to be an allergy. But allergic to what? That was the big question.
Zimbabweans are famous for many reasons in Ghana, chief amongst them being that President Robert Mugabe’s late wife, Sally Hayfron-Mugabe was a Ghanaian. The President himself, was a teacher in Ghana back in the day. His association with Dr Kwame Nkrumah is also topical in Ghana. The recent “Big Brother” marriage between our Pokello Nare and Ghanaian tailor Elikem Kumordzie has also cemented these ties.
So there I was, a decision was made to take me to 37 Military Hospital for emergency procedures. We surrendered to experts at this military hospital, which was struggling to cope with public health after over 400 medical doctors under the Ghana Medical Association had gone on strike.
Apart from my preoccupation with my condition, I was angry with this departure from the Hippocratic oath, let alone the timing, given Ghana was hosting the UN agency meeting – a Branding Summit for that matter.
What an exercise in de-branding given our slow recovery from the Ebola crisis!
Coming from a branding summit I do not wish to dwell much on the disturbing scenes at the hospital, suffice to say a withdrawal of expertise by essential services, such as medical doctors, is simply unacceptable! There has to be a way of dealing with professional disputes of this nature without costing lives.
The military doctor’s diagnosis was confirmed 24 hours later by another Trust Hospital Specialist, Dr Boye. They said it was a side effect from a hypertension drug I have been taking for years. The condition I had developed is called “angioedema” – and can be Goggled by the curious.
After doing so myself, I advise our many citizens on some hypertension drugs to be careful and double check with their physicians whether they really should be on some of these drugs, which other countries seem to be discouraging.
The following day saw
me participating in a full day’s programme that included an official opening ceremony by HE President John Dramani Mahama, followed by a photo opportunity with him and heads of delegation, panel sessions,
live CNN sessions by popular anchor Zain Asher, and several interviews with numerous media groups attending the session, needless to mention the selfie requests!
It was as if they were attracted by my “new ape look”, or wanted it for the record, just in case I got back to normal.
I must also admit that on being introduced to the President as the CAFcChair, easy going as he is, he still cast a curt curious second glance at me, as if to confirm that I had not emerged from a punch up with one of the delegates. Oh boy.
Meanwhile, my internal fears as they day progressed was the slow subsiding of the swollen face, which got everyone worried (was the cement settling for good?). At the Trust Hospital, a complimentary prescription was dispensed and in no time, this accelerated my recovery in the full glare of conference delegates when I joined them for latter sessions.
At this stage I must mention one soldiering comrade in Ghana – Her Excellency, Mrs Pavelyn Tendai Musaka, Dean of the Diplomatic Corps, whose circumstances in Accra seem to be folklore or something of a legend.
She virtually conducts her business by foot and hitch-hiking sometimes, because her car belongs to the cemetery, so she could hardly catch up with what was going on because of her immobility. Talk about personal and nation branding, I dryly joked with her.
I must admit that having taken the hypertension drug for so long and our system not being able to pick its side-effects got me thinking. I am sure many Zimbabwean citizens suffer from the same.
However, it seems God designed that the drug’s harmful effects on my health had to be discontinued on this trip, notwithstanding the accompanying discomfort of this happening in a foreign country and in a branding conference. I had to bear the humbling experience and still discharge my duties with that new look!
A courtesy call on President John Dramani Mahama, a detour to Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s Mausoleum and memorial park located in downtown Accra and taking pictures below his imposing bronze statue with the “Forward ever backward never” pose – the slogan for his Convention People’s Party as he was ushering the Gold Coast out of the shackles of colonialism into the Independent Nation we call Ghana today, and listening to his touching story from our eloquent guide made it all worthwhile.
I felt mine had just been a little adversity and it was time to move on with his vision for Brand Africa which is aptly captured in one of his eight books “Africa must Unite!”
