Seychelles aims to save vital tourism sector by becoming first nation to vaccinate entire population
Seychelles’ president Wavel Ramkalawan has said the tourism-reliant Indian Ocean archipelago will have vaccinated three-quarters of its 95,000 citizens against Covid-19 by March.
The president told The Telegraph that he hoped to be the first nation in Africa to do so, and possibly the world. “We have kept our borders mostly open,” he said, “but we want to reignite tourism as soon as possible. It’s vital to our survival.”
The ambitious public health initiative has been made possible by a donation of 50,000 doses of the Chinese Sinopharm vaccine, gifted to Seychelles by Crown Prince Mohammed bin Zayed Al Nahyan of Abu Dhabi. And by February, India has pledged to provide Seychelles with 100,000 doses of the Oxford-Astrazeneca vaccine.
To encourage the islanders to comply with the programme the president rolled up his left shirt sleeve live on national television and received the first vaccine. He was joined by most of his cabinet as well as his political rival, the ousted president Danny Faure, whom Ramkalawan defeated in last October’s elections.
The Sinopharm doses should cover all Seychellois below the age of 60, with the Oxford vaccines making up the balance.
Although local cases of the virus have been few, the crisis has hit Seychelles especially hard as the islands garner around 65% of their GDP from tourism. The Seychelles’ rupee has fallen by about 30% against the pound and the US dollar, pushing up the cost of living for the islanders sharply.
2019 was a record year for tourists, with almost 400,000 arrivals, but this dwindled to almost zero by April and May 2020 and has been very low even since border controls were partially relaxed.
However, in the first months of the pandemic, significant numbers of Emirati royals brought a useful cash boost to several resorts which they occupied as a ‘court in exile’. With no other visitors allowed in or out, the rich Middle Eastern guests commandeered an entire resort in which Seychellois hotel staff working for them could isolate in return for a generous monthly bonus.
In normal times, Germany, France and Britain make up the largest percentage of foreign visitors. Until Christmas, the islands had no cases of community transmission of Covid-19. However, the president explained: “Things have changed since then, we had a taxi driver who contracted coronavirus, and we are now getting about 30 cases a day, although we think the curve is flattening.”
Ramkalawan won last year’s elections on his sixth attempt, overturning more than 40 years of power by the former one-party state. He acknowledges that obtaining the presidency during the global pandemic is not ideal. “One of the challenges we face now is that my predecessor was extremely generous with government money when the pandemic arrived. Public sector workers received their full salaries throughout, as did many private sector workers. This was a clear bid to convince voters during the elections, but the consequence is we are now borrowing from the Central Bank to run the country.”
Ramkalawan maintains his parallel role as an Anglican minister, celebrating Eucharist in his parish church on Christmas Day. He says, like Solomon, that he relies on God to grant him wisdom. “I keep my faith,” he told The Telegraph. “We must pull together, and I think we have the national will to do that.”
According to Seychelles’ leading inbound tour operator, Alan Mason of ‘Mason’s Travel’, the travel industry is ready to resume business as soon as conditions improve. “Being such a small country has its advantages,” he said. “We can roll out the vaccine quickly. I think even when we’re immunised we will have to maintain safety protocols for quite some time but we want a ‘V’ shaped recovery. If we lose capacity in terms of tourism infrastructure and services it would take years to recover.”
Tourists from the UK were permitted in Seychelles until the outbreak of the new Covid-19 variant, but have now been added to the banned list which includes South Africa. British passport holders can only travel to the Seychelles if they are resident in a permitted country, or have spent 14 days there and can produced a negative test certificate.
