Hon Chair, the Department of Tourism is the prime of the South African tourism market, other role players in the sector such as Brand South Africa, South African Tourism, Tourism Grading Council of South Africa, brand experience and visitor experience teams have in their various roles made great strides to contribute to South Africa as the most reliable, appealing, resilient and competitive destination for tourism. The department's annual performance plan makes a number of generic achievable targets. It wishes to register 2019-22 plan, this predominantly anchored in the National Development Plan, NDP.
The President's comments in state of the nation address and the department strategy on tourism- for example by opening the tourism market both domestically and internationally, it hopes to attract foreign investment, create jobs, indite an inclusive economy and boost our economic growth. The reality is this; growth in tourism is also dependent on international variables
such as growth in foreign markets. South African Tourism notes that growth in foreign markets will crowd in spending, increase the consumer purchasing power, resulting in foreign travellers coming to South Africa. We need to create new routes to expand our tourism footprints. The US route must be explored. Our world heritage sites must have ambassadors throughout the world. South African Tourism intents at boosting the base of tourism by five million arrival trips during 2017-21, we therefore need to work tirelessly to address visa challenges especially, the visa processing challenges in India, China, New Zealand and Nigeria.
There is also a need to relax some of our visa requirements, to attract foreign investment and easy the cost of doing business. Government must deal with issues of policy certainty, water security, wildlife protection and personal security. The various figures in South African tourism, annual performance plan must be underpinned by the cutting edge infrastructure investment. Thank very much.