Tutazame Utalii kwa Jicho la Tatu :How Excessive Thirsty for Tourists Dollars Kills Cultural Tourism

By ADAM IHUCHA--Dressed in a bright red shuka with strands of equally colourful beads around his neck, Peter Lesongoyo, 27, stands along the road leading to Engaresero village in northern Tanzania, desperately waits for tourists. 

Unexpectedly, a tall and lanky Maasai morani together with his 20 or so colleagues are silent, with no strengths to shout or perform a traditional jumping dance in savannah scenery. 

Each one of them has unpleasant story to tell.  Life is unbearable as tourists have suddenly given their village the cold shoulder; for reasons neither Lesongoyo nor his teammates know.

“I’m greatly worried not only for myself, but also for the entire community because if tourists numbers keep on falling, we will perish of hunger” says Mr. Lesongoyo.

Indeed, as you travel from Arusha to Lake Natron or Lake Eyasi sprawling basins, you enter a world of private horror, where indigenous communities struggle to survive and cope with a modern lifestyle.

Hadzabe, Maasai and Tatoga ethnic groups, the surviving remnants of the relic of the hunter-gatherers and nomadic pastoralists on earth, basically live on what nature provides.

Their staple food consists wild fruits, honey, as well as bush meat, and milk. 

Owing to Climate change and other modern developments such as commercial agriculture and mining, which have depleted thick vegetation, forcing the indigenous communities to abandon their traditional lifestyles in order to survive.

 

In their efforts to adapt, lately, the communities have been engaging in cultural tourism trade, as an alternative economic activity, to keep their lives going.

They sell traditional items such as beads and outfits and earn lots of dollars to meet their ends meet.

But, the new business that brought rays of hope for them is not absolutely without storm.

Nuisance fees

As you read this, local authorities in northern Tanzania compete with each other in placing barriers for charging tourists en-route to the cultural setups.

Tourists travelling to Lake Natron and Oldonyo Lengai have since 2012 been subjected to cough up $40 each just on transit.

Monduli, Longido and Ngorongoro district councils have imposed these unspecified charges on each foreign tourist.

Tourists pay $10 at Engaruka gate in Monduli District Council, another $10 at Oldonyo Lengai for Longido District Council, while Ngorongoro District Council collects as high as $20 at Engarasero barrier.

Alexis Cronin, a foreign tourist doesn’t understand why he should pay $40 just on transit in addition to $25 entry fee.

“It doesn’t make sense for me to pay $40 for nothing, just on transit, I don’t know, but for me this is unfair. I wouldn’t mind if I would pay these money directly to the community” Mr Cronin says. 

As a result, tour operators have since March 1, 2013, unanimously excluded the route on their itineraries to protest against the local authorities’ harmful fees.

“It is very unfair to charge a tourist $40 even before seeing anything,” Tanzania Association of Tour Operators (Tato) Chief Executive Officer, Sirili Akko says.

He adds that business was all about negotiations, not harsh laws.

The four district councils of Ngorongoro, Longido, Monduli and Karatu have out-rightly rejected a proposal by outgoing Arusha regional commissioner Magessa Mulongo to abolish the charges.

The authorities told the commission the RC appointed on the matter that their budgets would be negatively impacted if they abolish the charges imposed on tourists.

Worse still, Karatu District Council executive director, Mosses Mabula says plans are underway to review model of charging the fee on tourists in order to spawn more revenues. 

The district, which imposed its collection barrier at Lake Eyasi entry point, considers inflicting $10 per tourist and $5 for every vehicle carrying tourists, instead of $10 each tourists van is currently charged.

 Final blow

Coordinator of cultural tourism at Mto wa Mbu, Wesley Kileo says the local authorities’ decision is a final blow to the indigenous communities whose lives depend on cultural tourism.

For instance, Mr Kileo says, the cultural tourism created employment to nearly 600 youths in the form of tour guides as well as workers at various campsites and lodges surrounding Lake Natron, Engaruka ruins and Oldonyo Lengai Mountain.

“This area is dry, with no other meaningful economic undertaking other than the cultural tourism business. The myriad fees is a final blow to these indigenous people living along the route,” he explains.

Tourists, mostly from overseas, have for ages been flocking undeterred to the villages situated along the shore of Lake Natron, the foot of Mount Oldonyo Lengai, and nearby the Engaresero River waterfalls, a hot spring and the recently discovered Homid footprints, some 220 km northwest of Arusha City.  

Lake Natron is the only regular breeding site for 1.5 to 2.5 million lesser flamingos in East Africa, whereas Mount Oldonyo Lengai is among the few world’s remain mountains with active volcano, together with the lately discovered Homid footprints are the key tourists allures.

With the climate change and its ripple effects hitting hard the northern Tanzania, indigenous youths at the villages around these attractions teamed up into groups to engage in cultural tourism.  

  

They collect and distribute tourism receipts to local communities to enable meeting their basic needs.

Each tourist wishing to kill a half or a full day visiting the waterfalls, Embalulu Crater, Rift Valley escarpment, Lake Natron shore, orpur baboon caves, the footprints, and a hot spring pay $25 as an entry fee.

Once this amount of money is settled, a member of the group guides a tourist through each attraction site, telling him the history of one godsend after another. 

“Tourists mostly prefer to hear the history of the volcanic mountain and its name which means the Mountain of God,” says Mr. Lesongoyo.

Maasai believe god spits fire on the mountain peak. When the mountain rumbles and a tremor ensues at night, residents surrounding it flee for fear of being trapped in floods fraught with lava. 

“We last experienced such a scenario in 2007 when the group received up to 2,000 tourists a month,” Lesongoyo, whose livelihood relies on guiding the tourists, recalls. 

Sadly, tourists have unexpectedly given the village the cold shoulder, as their numbers keep on declining each day due to myriad fees.

A high ranking official with Engaresero cultural tourism project Lazaro Ndirima says currently, the vehicles taking tourists there have fallen from 15 to only six per week on average, about 60 per cent decline, thus denying local people of the opportunity to sell to their cultural items to tourists.

“Last year we got 1,800 tourists earning us $45,000, but this year, we are not sure if they can reach 1,000 because tourists are not coming,” Mr Ndirima explains.

Lake Eyasi Cultural project coordinator Joseph Nyamsagori has the same story, saying this year they projected to receive 2,500 tourists’ vehicles, but practically he is not sure if they would hit 1,000.

 Reform

 Natural Resources and Tourism minister Lazaro Nyalandu pledged to come up with a sweeping reform on modalities of charging tourists outside national parks.

“We need tourists to spend more days in Tanzania. We cannot afford to let every Tom, Dick, and Harry wake up one morning and impose a barrier on the highway to collect money from our dear tourists,” Mr Nyalandu notes.

He argues that with the current challenges of Ebola and terrorism, Tanzania should be the last country to impose any nuisance taxes on tourists.

According to him, the cultural establishments along the Lake Natron route were rare example of transferring tourists’ dollars to common people directly and through multiplier effects.

Transferring dollars from international tourists to poor people living around tourist destinations has been a major challenge throughout East Africa and the world.

This might be true, for instance, lots of dollars are generated from Tanzania`s world-famous northern tourist circuit, but very little trickles down to the pockets of ordinary people living in its vicinity.

Pro-poor

Freddy Massawe, the Chief Executive Officer for Tanzania Association of Cultural Tourism Organizers (TACTO) says that at the moment the pro-poor cultural tourism handles just 30 percent of 1.2 million tourists who visit Tanzania’s wildlife-rich-attractions annually. 

This means the segment is responsible for nearly 360,000 tourists, directly earning the common Tanzanians roughly $32.4 million annually, but Mr Massawe sees this as paltry amount in comparison with the potential. 

 Looking beyond the numbers, experts say that this is a typical example of successful model, in which tour companies could borrow a leaf to transfer the tourist dollars to the poor people in the country. 

Mr Massawe underscored the need for local tour operators to incorporate culture in their safari package in order to transfer more dollars to the local people. 

“The country is blessed with over 120 tribes who live in harmony. This is a sleeping giant tourist product that needs a good will of tour operators to include in their itinerates for tourists to appreciate cultural diversity and pay direct to the community” Mr Massawe said. 

“Cultural tourism if well developed can attract million of tourists in our country given the cultural diversity we have” he explains, adding that countries such as France, Egypt and Morocco rely on cultural tourism solely and have attracted millions of tourists. 

For instance, he says, French cultural tourism attracted 87.3 million international tourists in 2013, with Egypt 9.1 million and Morocco 10 million, generating a multi-billions-dollar for local people. 

“In Tanzania a multiple taxes imposed by inter-sectoral Acts frustrate efforts to unlock the cultural tourism potential” Mr Massawe noted, stressing that in certain instances local government authorities do raise tourism levies without considering its impact.  

Mr. Massawe argues that cultural tourism if well developed could generate employment to thousands of youths and women as well as bringing in the much-needed foreign currency.

More importantly, it can also be used to combat poaching, as community will see the benefits of tourism, he says. 

Growing at a steady rate for the past two years, Tanzania tourism is booming with latest data confirming the industry as Tanzania’s top foreign currency earner and export sector, outshining the gold.

Fresh figures from central bank indicate that the tourism brought in $1.973 billion during the year ended June 2014, up from $1.757 billion earned in previous corresponding year.

Recent statistics show that earnings from the Tanzanian tourism industry increased from $200 million in 1993 to $1.88 billion in 2013.

The number of visitors also increased over the same period from 230,000 to a record one million, creating direct employment to 156,500 Tanzanians.

The reported number of tourists who visited Tanzania in 2012 and 2013 places the country on the map of leading African safari destinations with million-plus visitors per year.

Other tourist competitive African destinations, rich with resources and which have a high record of tourists reaching a million or above are Kenya, Zimbabwe, Botswana, Namibia, Zambia and South Africa.