THE decision by the African Marketing Confederation (AMC) to cancel the inaugural African Marketing Summit that was scheduled for Victoria Falls next month over Ebola fears is a very unfortunate development.
AMC had scheduled the conference for October 15 to 18 in the resort town, but the important meeting has been postponed indefinitely, largely because of ignorance.
The Zimbabwe Tourism Authority has also revealed that 15 buyers from Botswana had withdrawn from the World Tourism Expo set for Harare on October 16 to 17 after giving similar reasons.
A devastating Ebola outbreak has hit Guinea, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and Liberia hardest since it was first detected in March.
4 000 have been reported dead while tens of thousands were infected in West Africa.
Some cases of Ebola have also been reported in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
However, Southern Africa remains untouched by the outbreak, which makes the decision of the AMC and Botswana Tourism Board rather unfortunate.
There is no Southern African country that has recorded a case of Ebola and the Southern African Development Community has been very proactive in making sure that the outbreak does not filter down south despite the high number of immigrants from West Africa.
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Several countries except Botswana have not closed their borders to African immigrants, but they have put very strict screening mechanisms at their points of entry.
Clearly, the situation has not reached a level to warrant the kind of reaction by AMC and Botswana. ZTA chief executive officer Karikoga Kaseke has blamed the withdrawal of the Botswana buyers on statements attributed to government officials claiming that Zimbabwe had not capacity to detect Ebola.
Kaseke may have a point because communication in times of outbreaks becomes a very sensitive matter. Responsible government authorities should be on top of the situation always to prevent rumours and misinformation such as was the case with the scenarios mentioned above.
There is no doubt that the government needs well-established communication pathways among predictable stakeholders to deal with the likelihood of misinformation.
If the communication aspect is not handled well, the Ebola outbreak in faraway West African countries would cause irreparable damage to Zimbabwe’s fragile tourism sector.
