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Artist Innocent Kayombo has been selling his art pieces along the Camps Bay beach front for the past 10 years. PHOTO: KAYLYNNE BANTOM
CAMPS BAY
New hope for vendors KAYLYNNE BANTOM KAYLYNNE.BANTOM@ MEDIA24.COM
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Cape Town artist, who has been selling his art pieces along the Camps Bay beach front for over a decade, says beaches might have reopened, but the damage to his pocket has been done. Daily, Innocent Kayombo sits in the scorching sun selling paintings and handmade bead sculptures hoping that the few beach goers will buy some of his items. With the opening of the beaches on Tuesday 2 February, he has now added chips, sweets and sunglasses to his collection. He hopes that will improve his profit margins so that he can pay his R6 000 monthly rental for his Woodstock flat. “I am the breadwinner,
my family depends on me, so what can I do? I must do what I can to put food on the table.” The beaches, public parks and public pools were closed in December to control the spread of the Covid-19 virus. With the easing of lockdown restrictions, Kayombo is happy that the beach has been reopened. However, he says he won’t be able to recover the thousands of rands he lost while the beach was closed in December and January. “December is normally our busiest time, that’s when we make the money. But when they announced that the beaches will be closed, we sat here every day and made no sales. It was hard. We are struggling.” According to Kayombo, during a good summer season he would make between R40 000 and R50 000. He says he didn’t even make a fraction over
the festive season. “This time things are very hard for us, I don’t know how we are going to live,” explains Kayombo. Nsengou Gounedou, also an artist, says he has been a trader in the City Bowl for many years. Three years ago he started trading in Camps Bay. He says between December last year and January he dived into his savings just to survive. “We did not have any clients. It was bad. I borrowed money from friends or sold my art for half price. Anything just to survive.” Gounedou says although the beaches are open, his main clients are overseas tourists. David Maynier, provincial minister of finance and economic opportunities, says popular tourist attractions like Kirstenbosch saw only 79 907 visitors last December compared to 103 892 in 2019. Maynier says Boulders beach saw 22 489
compared to the 86 552 in December 2019. The Table Mountain Aerial Cableway had only 35 812 visitors in comparison to the 116 930 visitors in December 2019. “This data confirms the desperate state of the tourism and hospitality industry in the Western Cape,” says Maynier. “However, we could not have anticipated the intensity of the second wave, at home and abroad, that resulted in stricter international travel restrictions, route cancellations by airlines and the alert level three restrictions, all of which has had a severe impact on the tourism and hospitality sector.” Premier Alan Winde said in a statement recently that the closure of beaches over the December period had a devastating impact on tourism and on the ocean’s economy in the Western Cape, costing the province in excess of R100 million every month.