As a nation of sociopaths, we must exploit our tourists

I saw this in a Sunday paper: “South Africa welcomed 7.2 million tourists between January and October last year, with more than 76% of them coming from Africa.”

Well, that’s just not true. We sighed at their attempts to drive on our roads, rolled our eyes at the things they wore and elbowed them aside when they got in our way.

If you don’t own a business or a shop, the only way you can make money out of tourism is if you kidnap a tourist and hold him to ransom.

Not ideal, because you then have to feed them and take them to the bathroom. It’s like looking after an infirm relative. Far easier just to mug them. It’s old school, I know, but we South Africans don’t like to move with the times. It is the times that must move with us.

For some reason, mugging doesn’t come naturally to a lot of white people, even though they’d quite like to have euros, pounds or dollars in their collection. Too mannered, perhaps. “I’m terribly sorry, but would you mind handing over your … that’s a lovely shirt you’re wearing. A dashiki, you say? Mind if I ask where you got it from? Are you hungry? I know a divine sushi place around the corner…”

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Whichever way you look at it, tourists exist solely to be exploited. We don’t care if they’re enjoying themselves or getting the best photos. We only care that we’re enjoying ourselves. And this is how it should be. We are a nation of sociopaths, not empaths.

So, 7.2 million tourists in 10 months. If each tourist represented a litre of beer, they could only fill three Olympic-size swimming pools. That’s pathetic. I have just spent four months in Paris. Fifty million tourists invaded that city last year; 11 million during the Olympic fortnight alone. That’s why the French hate people.

If 11 million visitors had to arrive in South Africa in the space of two weeks and decided to form a militia, they’d be able to take over the country in a day. Technically, this would disqualify them from being tourists and we would, in theory, be allowed to shoot them. But we’d run out of bullets and all be speaking foreign by Easter.

When Tourism Minister Patricia de Lille excitedly announced that 76% of our tourists came from Africa last year, I assumed they were streaming in from the old colonies like Congo, Cameroon, Senegal and so on, using their Franco-African charm to inveigle their way into the lucrative car guard market. Apparently not.

Our tourists came almost exclusively from neighbouring countries or countries neighbouring our neighbours. As the saying goes, good fences make good neighbours. We have neither.

De Lille said most tourists tended to visit the Western Cape, Mpumalanga, Gauteng, the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal. This means four provinces could be scrapped and tourists wouldn’t miss them at all. Nor would we, quite frankly.

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The honourable minister said that just over 21 million trips were taken inside the country by South Africans, although she never specified whether they were doing magic mushrooms or acid or where these people were going or even how many found their way back home.

She said that tourism brings billions of rands into the economy. This means nothing to people like you and me. A footbridge in Limpopo can cost half a billion rand to not build and we don’t blink an eye.

There is so much theft and corruption in this country that numbers have long since lost their impact. To us, millions and billions are the same. It pours out of the tap into a sieve that drains into the pockets of people who aren’t us.

Speaking of meaningless numbers, less than a million people from the UK and Europe visited us. Then again, knowing home affairs, five million were turned away for having a bad haircut, too much makeup or simply because the immigration official was having a bad day.

I don’t get it. The pound and the euro can kick the rand’s ass any day of the week without breaking a sweat. Don’t these people know they can get crayfish and champagne for the price of a burger back home? Sure, they can also get robbed or murdered, but, hey, crayfish.

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Last year, 354 000 North Americans took their lives in their hands to visit us. I imagine that many of them were scouting for opportunities to get the hell out before Donald Trump is sworn in. We’re just one of the many countries around the world bracing themselves for an influx of gringos.

A little over 60 000 tourists and drug mules visited from Central and South America. Apparently, this was a “notable surge” of 75%. A particularly good cocaine harvest or are more Costa Ricans desperate for a break from their beautiful, peaceful country? Hard to say. No red flags there, then.

Tourism from China rose by 11%, reaching over 35 000. This isn’t very much at all and I hope most of them stay on illegally and start their own restaurants. If there’s one thing South Africa needs, it’s more Chinese takeaways.

Visitors spent R95 million while locals spent R121 billion. These numbers don’t sound right. The only explanation I can think of is that foreigners are bringing in their own drugs. That’s not very nice of them. The least they could do is support our dealers.

“We have also been aggressively marketing offerings in our townships, villages and small dorpies,” De Lille said. In other words, through the use of death threats, kidnappings and bribery.

If that’s what it takes to get people to visit Dullstroom, it’s fine with me.