WE NEED TO STOP BEING CASUAL

Last week the kidnap of US tourist Kimberly Sue Endecott and her tour guide Jean Paul Mirenge came to a happy ending with their release from captivity, apparently unscathed.

For people in the industry it was a week of sheer terror. It was bad enough that the two were kidnapped but if in addition anything more untoward had happened to them, the industry was bound to suffer for a while to come.

We have been there before. In 1999 eight tourists and their guide were killed by suspected Interahamwe rebels in the Bwindi Impenetrable Forest National Park. Subsequently the park was shut down for four months. In that year tourist numbers to the park collapsed by almost half to 2,111 from about 3,500 in 1998.

It took another three years for numbers to recover to their pre-Bwindi murders.

One Jean Paul Bizimana was convicted in 2006 for the crime and sentenced to 15 years.

In 2001, 11 students of the Jimmy Sekasi Institute were killed during a tour of the Murchison Falls National Park by the Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) rebels. Sekasi himself was also on the trip and was killed too. This event put paid to the Saraova group’s investment in Paraa Lodge and shut down the park for all practical purposes.

"Tourism is the country’s single largest foreign exchange earner and growing. In 2018 there were about 1.8 million visitors to Uganda brining in revenues of more than $1.5b....

Some determined if sporadic marketing, of the country has seen tourist numbers rise to current levels form 1.1 million a decade ago according to eth Uganda Bureau of Statistics (UBOS). Investment has followed suit with bed’s in the hotel industry up to 100,000 today.  

Ahead of the Commonwealth Head’s of Government Meeting (CHOGM) in 2007 we were scrambling to get 4,000 hotel beds of the quality befitting delegates of the event. Today a cursory count of the beds in the 3-to-5-s tar hotel range shows we have about doubled that figure since. And industry players will report there is still more room for quality hotels in the industry.

What we have invested so far and the industry’s long term potential demands that we treat the industry with a little more respect.

Reports following the recent kidnap suggest a casualness around our national parks that is not commensurate with the aforementioned facts.

For starters it was reported that at the time of her kidnap, as she went out for an evening tour of the Queen Elizabeth National, she went out without an armed guide. 

How does a tourist decide whether they will or will not go along with a guide? And we allow it? Was this done out of some sense of inferiority, pandering to a white tourist? Who knows better the lay of the land?

This casualness is even more disturbing when it turns out that kidnaps of locals in the area for ransom are a regular occurrence.

If we are this casual about this how much more have we missed around the security of these parks and sites?

Uganda is not situated in the ideal location. All around us we have neighbours whose security has broken down, do not wish us well or have their own internal contradictions spilling over into our space.

Unfortunately for us, our best attractions are located or straddle our borders with these same 

countries.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to work out that the odds are it’s only a matter of time before something bad happens there.

I am sure the minimum security presence or precautions we take have dissuaded criminals from trying anything or even prevented instances like the one that has h=just happened but as one security chief once said, with terrorism you just need to make one mistake and they succeed. The security in our national parks and tourist site should be treated with such vigilance.

There is a point to be made for non-intrusive security so that the tourists can enjoy their holiday – but non-intrusive does not mean absence.

Some investors may even be against new measures to beef up security around their operations, as they would take away from their bottom line, but the government which has a better view of the damage one freak occurrence can cost, must insist and if the operators think they can not comply they may be shown the door.

And these enhanced measures should not only be for foreign guests. In fact local tourists should be treated with sifter kid gloves.

"In this world of internet connectivity, a local visitor who gets into trouble can get the message out to the world just as fast as a foreign visitor. True the global news networks will not give it as much play, if any, unlike if it were a foreign tourist, but if you think about it Ugandans are often asked for recommendations of local sites by foreign visitors. A bad experience for one Ugandan may have just as debilitating an effect, as third party endorsements more than glitzy advertising are what people pay attention to...

The lesson of the recent kidnap is that given the tourism sector’s current and long term importance to the economy it cannot be business as usual.

The kind of numbers we are seeing coming to patronize our shores have been painstakingly built over decades but they can be decimated with one small misstep. Let us get serious.