By Edward Baliddawa
Since the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic, most voices have been of optimism and even giving optimistic speculations on the upcoming rebound of the sector.
Although, no actual figures of this rebound have been seen yet, the optimism in the industry continues.
Elsewhere, for example in United Kingdom and Netherlands, we have seen some relaxation of the lock down
measures in the wake of receding numbers of new infections while at the same time we are seeing very alarming situation in Brazil, Chile and India where the numbers of new infections have continued to rise on account of new mutating variants of the virus.
In all this, it is the tourism and travel industry that is being hit hardest.
Travels are continuing to be restricted. Various countries that have detected new virus variants have gone ahead to impose travel restrictions to and from those countries from which these virus variants are reported to have emanated.
United Kingdom, United Arab Emirates, Israel, United States of America and Uganda have imposed travel restrictions on India.
As these new variants continue to show up due to the mutation processes that the Covid-19 undertakes in a particular environment around the world, it is most possible that there will be many more variants.
This therefore implies that, countries will for a long foreseeable future continue to impose travel restrictions in order to protect their nationals and to curb the spread of the variants.
Given the sad reality above, it becomes doubtable if tourism as it has been previously known in East Africa and Uganda in particular will be able to rebound and be sustainable as the industry optimists would like us to believe.
If international travels are still most likely going to be restricted or minimised in both the medium and long term, then it must be realised that visitor numbers and revenues from those international visitors to our countries of East Africa who largely depend on these visitors are going to continue to get
a real hit.
Here are some frightening examples; In case of Tanzania the earnings from tourism dropped from $2.67bn in a year ending February 2020 to only $876.8mn in a year to February 2021 according to Bank of Tanzania.
The fall is due the decrease of the number of international arrivals that dropped to 509,773 from 1,553,686 visitors the previous year.
Kenya is reported to have lost Kshs. 80bn ($752mn) so far in tourism revenue about half of last year’s total earnings due to Corona Virus crisis according to Minister Najib Balala.
The sector is one of the leading sources of foreign exchange earnings of Ksh.163.56bn ($1,54bn) last year and had been expected to grow 1% in 2020 which unfortunately didn’t happen.
It is further reported that international visitors to Kenya fell to fewer than 500,000 in the first 10 months from 1.7mn in the same period last year.
This fall in visitors is reported to have knocked Kshs.110bn ($995mn) off the overall revenue that had been predicted to reach Kshs. 147.5bn.
As for Uganda, it is expected that Uganda will lose $1.6bn in tourism earnings due to Covid-19 pandemic.
Although there had seemed to be a lull of relief with the discovery of the Covid-19 vaccines, there is however emerging fears by the expert scientists that vaccination of two jabs in case of the AstraZeneca, Pfizer and Modena vaccines or the one jab for Johnson & Johnson vaccines, won’t be enough insulation
from a possible re-occurrence of the virus infection.
In effect, this means that Coronavirus is with us in whichever form and the world has to contend with that.
It also means that as long as the virus is still lingering in our midst, travel restrictions and cautious travels are going to be the norm.
We are not likely to see a rebound of those massive travels and visitors coming to our national parks.
We know too well how large numbers of our tour and travel businesses thrive on the tourism sector.
We know of reports of how a number of businesses in the tour and tourism sector have been hit badly by the current reduced numbers of international visitors.
Many people have had their livelihoods completely wiped out while those that are still hanging on are financially limping.
The unfortunate state of affairs is that the conservation efforts to protect our endowments and heritage are also greatly hampered by the fall in earnings from the sector.
This is when the national planners and strategists need to seriously re-visit the issue of tourism in the current global set up and dynamics pertaining to the Coronavirus.
It is my view that domestic visitors in our particular context of Uganda cannot sustain the tourism sector as we know it due to a number of social-economic hamstrings.
It is therefore prudent to start downsizing our expectations and reliance on tourism as the only redeeming sector for our economies.
If we don’t start re-thinking how we can work our economies to grow in the wake of reduced tourism earnings, we might end up with national parks that are not only unvisited but also that are just hard to keep on maintaining.
When this happens, obviously, poaching will be on the rise, the invasive species (unwanted growths) within the Parks will exponentially increase and ultimately access to these parks will become impossible.
Areas of new thinking:
There is no doubt that Uganda is richly endowed as an agricultural country and which has all the enviable potential of being the real African food basket.
We have seen with a few experiments made on a limited scale of coffee growing the tremendous returns on investment both to the farmer and the government in terms of export earnings.
In Uganda, is a country where we have the soils to grow and flourish anything from vegetables, fruits, nuts and cereals. These are items that will always be on global demand irrespective of the situation.
In fact the more the people are restricted to their homes or their communities due to Corona pandemic, the more the demand for such foodstuffs will arise.
Although the Coronavirus restrictions will apply and affect planes bringing potential visitors to Uganda, experience has shown that cargo planes carrying food stuffs from Uganda to those other destinations will always be permitted.
The banks will have no restrictions whatsoever in effecting remittances to us here is lieu of the export
sales that we will have made, In summary, international commerce will continue to thrive and that is all that we need.
I am particularly watching with keen interest what has been reported in Kenya, where a progressive agricultural investor has asked the government to parcel out 120 acres of land within the Amboseli National Park for the purpose of growing Hass Avocados the new “green gold” as an alternative to falling number of visitors and tourism earnings from the park.
Actually our very own Amos Wekesa a leading tour and travel practitioner here in Uganda has shown us the way by his recent venture into the agro processing business as a way of diversifying his business fortunes.
Before the coronavirus pandemic, Wekesa admittedly would have never thought of venturing into
agriculture which he never understood much like tourism.
The author is an economist and former active politician.
