Nowhere in Botswana would P500 be enough to buy you a night’s accommodation at a hotel or lodge plus a full day’s meals as well as housekeeping supplies and amenities. Miraculously, that is the deal that the Office of the President has been able to seal with desperate hospitality establishments that cater for Covid-19 restrictees.
“The unit price for quarantine facilities shall not exceed P500 per person per day inclusive of three meals (breakfast, lunch and supper), VAT and other levies,” reads a clause in the standard contract between OP and hospitality establishments.
A related clause states that if there are more than one person in a room, the extra person or persons shall be paid at a rate of P200 per person per night including all three meals for the day and any other associated shared-room expenses.
For breakfast, hotels and lodges are contractually required to provide guests with cereal/porridge with milk plus tea/coffee as well as assorted fruit and bottled water (500ml) or, bread slices plus eggs (boiled or fried), tea/coffee, assorted fruits and bottled water (500ml). For both lunch and supper, the guests get starch (rice/papa/bogobe/dumpling/spaghetti/macaroni; vegetables in two varieties with the following options: beetroot, spinach, rape, butternut, coleslaw, mixed vegetables and fried cabbage; protein in the form of chicken, beef and fish; one soft drink can; and 500ml of bottled water.
Additionally, establishments have to provide standard housekeeping supplies and amenities in the form of toiletries (packaged soaps, shampoo, body lotion and shower gel), toilet rolls, sanitary bin bags and coffee/tea kit being electric kettle as well as coffee/tea, sugar and creamer satchets.
Says a disgruntled hotel manager: “In reality, the P500 that the government pays covers the food only and to all intents and purposes, the accommodation and convenience amenities are provided free of charge.”
There is an additional cost that establishments have to incur: that of laundering bedding at the end of the quarantine period. Ordinarily, bedding is changed on a daily basis (or so guests are led to believe) but with Covid-quarantining, it is only changed at the end of a guest’s stay. What that means is that if one stays at a hotel for 14 days as a Covid restrictee, they will use the same bedding for that entire period. A hotel worker says that detergents that are used to launder this bedding (some of which would be hideously dirty if a room was occupied by a guest with poor hygiene habits) is prohibitively expensive. Curtains are also laundered in order to fully sterilize a room.
“Some guests are under-age children who still wet the bed,” says an industry source. “You can imagine what housekeeping staff has to deal with when Covid guests check out.”
Establishments typically use white linen bedding but that colour is ill-suited for Covid-quarantine stay, especially when guests have poor hygiene habits. Resultantly, some establishments have opted for dark-coloured bedding. The contract with OP says that hospitality establishments shall bear all costs for providing services. This means that these establishments paid for the new bedding and will not be reimbursed by the government.
Considering the circumstances, this deal is almost a shakedown. The hospitality industry is one of the worst Covid-affected and operating on the half-a-loaf-is-better-than-nothing rationale, some establishments have been forced to accept what is without doubt a very raw deal. Another hotel manager says that business is so slow that one feels almost grateful when the District Health Management Teams, which administer Covid quarantines, call to book guests.
However, some mostly big hotels have opted to turn down this offer because they would incur bigger losses and be forced to dumb down customer service standards. Accommodating Covid-guests also brings reputational risk with usual guests who despite all assurances, are still uncomfortable about staying in a facility that also accommodates people infected with a deadly disease.
In response to a question of why some Covid-19 patients quarantine at home while others are, at government expense, put up at hospitality establishments, the Chief Public Relations Officer in the Ministry of Health and Wellness, Christopher Nyanga, explained that the Ministry uses both facility and community-based care for both isolation and quarantine.
“The decision to use either is dependent on the risk assessment carried out on both the client in question and the environment in which they live. This includes taking into consideration disease status within the locality in line with the overall intention of disease control,” he said.
As Sunday Standard reported last week, there is another set of circumstances that hospitality establishments find themselves having to contend with. In his address to the nation during the national lockdown, President Mokgweetsi Masisi promised to ensure that the conduct of commerce was not severely disrupted by the pandemic. Soon thereafter, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance and Economic Development, Dr. Wilfred Mandlebe, notified the nation, through a public statement, about the Ministry’seconomic response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Under the “Ease of Doing Business” sub-section, he stated the following: “All Government institutions to pay purchase order within 5 days and parastatals to pay within 24 hours”; “Address GABS downtime related issues”; “Improve efficiency of procurement processes”; and “Government to pay all outstanding invoices (arrears) in two weeks (P530million).”
The hospitality establishment’s contract with OP wildly deviates from the timelines that Mandlebe set. It states that payment shall be made “within 30 days” of the date of receipt of an invoice after the acceptance and approval of services. While Nyanga stated that if everything else is in order, payment can be made within 10 days, we have gained access to documents that prove that doesn’t always happen.
The nature of Covid is itself complicating matters because quotations necessarily have to be compiled after guests check out. After the purchase order is issued, hotel staff have to compile and submit an invoice. Both the quotation and invoice have to be signed by a site manager (a “boarding master” or “matron” as it were) who also lodges with Covid restrictees for the entire duration of their stay. A hotel manager says that in some cases, staff members have to run around trying to locate a site manager, who would long have checked out himself or herself, to get him or her to sign off on the invoice.
