STATEMENT BY KENYA TOURISM INDUSTRY

rebuilding the industry after the slump of 1997

• Kenya's tourism stakeholders have worked tirelessly over the last seven years to rebuild the industry after the slump of 1997, earning the country Kshs 65.4 Billion in 2007.

• Tourism is now Kenya s leading source of foreign exchange, directly employing over 250,000 people while supporting an estimated 3 million people indirectly

• Tourism has a huge impact on all aspects of the national economy, especially agriculture, transport and communication, aviation, oil companies, breweries, manufacturers, technology firms, insurance companies, advertising agencies, construction firms, artisans, handicraft makers, community projects, the small business and informal sector amongst many others.

• Tourism generates approximately Kshs 20 Billion in tax revenue for the Government each year.

• A big percentage of tourist bookings for the first half of the 2008 have been lost.

Those for the rest of the year hang in the balance awaiting the outcome of political developments.

An average of Kshs 5.5 Billion in revenue is expected to be lost every month.

• The view that the current economic crisis can be readily and quickly overcome is erroneous.

Tourism recovery is a long and expensive process that needs a supportive and pro-active leadership willing to achieve this.

WHY SHOULD THE ABOVE CONCERN THE KENYANS ?

There may be a temptation to view the above issues as "a tourism industry problem" but the truth of the matter is that it is all Kenyans irrespective of their political affiliation who will suffer because:- -

• Hotels and lodges are recording very low occupancies and some are almost empty.

There are also, very few visitors to the National Parks and Reserves.

As a result, 120,000 people face imminent unemployment and their families will be plunged into poverty regardless of how they voted.

• There will be a ripple effect hitting suppliers in agriculture, industry and other supporting sectors.

These sectors will suffer loss of businesses and jobs. Airlines are also recording losses as tourists fail to come to Kenya.

• The tourism informal sector supports an estimated 250,000 jobs in several areas such as handicrafts, transport, supplies etc.

A vast majority of these workers (especially at the Coast) stand to suffer immediately regardless of how they voted.

• Several Government projects are supported (directly or indirectly) by revenues derived from tourism.

The viability of such projects may well be affected.

• Several Local Authorities areas (e.g. Narok, Trans Mara, lsiolo, and Samburu) are almost entirely dependent on tourism.

The livelihood and incomes of persons resident in these areas are at risk.

Kenya's reputation as a leading tourist destination is being damaged in the global marketplace with our competitors taking away our prospective clients.

Do our leaders care?

OUR MESSAGE TO KENYANS :

Our Honourable Members of Parliament have shown us the way.

Despite their differences, when they met in Parliament they did not engage in demonstrations and violence.

They observed the rules of the House and in so doing have now secured their salaries and by extension, their livelihoods.

Why do you want to destroy yours?

Shun violence and hooliganism ... Give dialogue a chance... You can make a difference.

To Politicians:

• There are more Kenyans trying to get to work and earn their living than there are those trying to demonstrate on the streets.

Let us separate the political problems currently being experienced from the right of all Kenyans (of whatever political persuasion) to earn a decent living.

• Every day that the political impasse continues is another deathblow to the economy.

While negotiations continue to falter and the disagreements spill over into our streets with calls for demonstrations, millions of innocent Kenyans are losing their livelihoods.

Their hopes and dreams for the future are being shattered regardless of how they voted.

We specifically appeal to H.E. the President, Hon. Mwai Kibaki and Hon. Raila Odinga to demonstrate their Statesmanship and save this great country from economic disaster Show Kenyans that you care about our country and act now by meeting and effecting a political settlement to this political crisis

Tourism must be given priority to rebuild our economy and our leaders need to address this issue immediately.

Tourism Creates Wealth. Tourism Creates Employment. Tourism Alleviates Poverty!

Please restore and maintain peace!!!

Kenya Tourism Federation : Tel: 601343, Fax: 604730 Tourist Helpline: 254-020-604767 Cell: 0722 745645/0733 617499 Email : safetour@wananchi.com

Quelques mots tires de la presse kenyane de ce jour...reflexion face a une dure realite...

Our leaders have let us down

Sometimes I sit down and reflect on all that is happening in Kenya today and cry. The question that keeps coming to my mind is: do our leaders ever think about what they do to the people?

Being a young Kenyan I work hard each day to get something out of my life. Everything I own is through my honesty and hard work. But, like all the other youths who were sweet-talked into voting for our “caring leaders”, I face tomorrow with fear.

Our jobs hang in the balance, while salaries and other incomes as well as a good sleep are threatened.

I wake up every morning worried that I will be sent back home with the simple statement, no work — all the hard work I have put into my job gone with the wind. Do the leaders think about me as they fight for power?

What breaks my heart is that all the leaders who have forced us into this kind of life have it all. They don’t have to worry about their jobs, salaries, food, rent or a warm bed to sleep in.

While we wallow in emotional and physical pain they become richer every day. They don’t have to feel the pain of a parent who is not sure of what will happen to the children. While the leaders are on holiday and surrounded by armed guards, our brothers and sisters engage in battles with police and are lucky if they are not injured or killed.

Do the leaders take time to wonder what if the injured or killed children were theirs?

Do our leaders really care about us? Does it bother them that the little salary we gladly wait for to get us through the month might not be there any more?

What do they benefit when they influence young people and other Kenyans to hate one another? Have they seen all the children that sleep in the cold every night with tears flowing down their cheeks and wondering what mistake they made to deserve the torture?

If I had children I would ban them from watching our leaders talk on TV. For instead of being role models they have become a bad influence and a disgrace to Kenyans.

Our leaders’ conduct has left a deep wound in my heart and those of many other Kenyans.

Quelques mots tires de la presse kenyane de ce jour...reflexion face a une dure realite...

Hope for peace will never wane

So many things have happened but, I believe, Kenyans have not lost hope for peace.

So many have been displaced, so many are sick and helpless and so many have been abandoned by their loved ones, but there is still hope.

For over 40 years, we have toiled building and laying a firm foundation for our nation.

We are now spending less time and energy to destroy the fruits of hard work.

Let us fight for our rights in a peaceful way.

May we one day wake up and find an azure blue sky reflecting peace, tranquillity and prosperity. That is the Kenya we all dream of.

La famine à l'horizon 2008
"La population du Kenya risque de connaître la famine dans les mois à venir si la crise politique persiste", note le quotidien de Nairobi Daily Nation. Selon un rapport pour la sécurité alimentaire, l'instabilité politique actuelle et les précipitations insuffisantes cette année dans certaines régions du pays risquent de compromettre le fragile équilibre agricole que le Kenya avait réussi à instaurer. L'insuffisance alimentaire se fait déjà sentir, et les prix grimpent. Par peur de l'inflation et de la pénurie, les consommateurs des villes s'approvisionnent en masse et stockent le maïs transformé en farine.

Pour le Programme alimentaire mondial des Nations unies (PAM), il y a encore suffisamment de maïs, qui est l'aliment de base, pour nourrir la population pendant la première partie de l'année 2008, mais c'est au second semestre que la baisse de production devrait se faire sentir. Depuis le début de la crise, 20 % du maïs planté, soit 300 000 tonnes, n'a pas été récolté. Ce taux pourrait atteindre 70 % si la situation politique ne s'améliore pas rapidement. La violence qui a suivi le résultat des élections du 27 décembre 2007 a en effet obligé plus de 250 000 familles à quitter leurs terres et cesser leurs activités. Aujourd'hui, les grains de maïs pourrissent dans les entrepôts.

Quelques mots tires de la presse kenyane de ce jour...reflexion face a une dure realite...

Interests of the citizenry must come first

Experts are still grappling with the daunting task of quantifying the collective damage to the economy over the last three weeks of post-election violence. Hundreds of lives have been lost and property destroyed on a scale never been witnessed in this country since independence.

Hundreds of thousands of people have been displaced from their homes and are now living in deplorable conditions in refugee camps in their own country. Thousands more have crossed international borders to seek refuge in neighbouring countries.

Again, we have never had such a huge number of people seeking refuge outside the country.

As a media house, we have been consistent and passionate in calling upon leaders across the political divide to put the interest of the country and citizenry ahead of their political ambitions. We have urged them to come together to save this country from the wasteful conflict that has been gathering momentum since the disputed presidential election results were announced.

As we report elsewhere in this newspaper, our leaders either do not appreciate or seem to grasp the magnitude of the human suffering caused by fighting which is largely assuming ethnic overtones. The result is mass destitution as once thriving rural economies have been wiped out in just three weeks.

The situation on the ground should be enough to jolt political leaders out of their hardline stances and move to quickly resolve their differences that are holding the country to ransom. In addition to the traumatising of large sections of the population–children and women bearing the brunt of it all–the bad blood between communities will require more than a round table conference of the adversaries to resolve. And it is doubtful whether conventional economic methods can conclusively put into figures the losses incurred by farmers and small and medium-sized businesses in the trouble spots across the country. What is evident is that it will take a long time before full recovery is realised.

Rift Valley Province, which has borne the worst of the violence, is a case in point. This extensive region is one the most productive in the country. Our food security is often dependent on it. It produces maize, wheat and other important food crops on a large scale.

Before the elections, fertile farms in areas like Makutano, Mumberes, Timboroa and Burnt Forest held large quantities of unharvested crops. The towns were robust commercial centres where hundreds of people were in gainful employment. Many of the farms have been destroyed and the market centres are deserted.

Thousands of people working on tea plantations and other large farms have lost their jobs and the wherewithal to fend for their families. In turn, these holdings are losing millions of shillings daily in lost production, further complicating the economic situation of the region.

Critical farming resources like tractors and harvesters have been destroyed in the mayhem. The infrastructure that makes the province attractive to both local and international investors is in ruins.

Ordinarily around this time, farmers would be tilling their fields in preparation for the rainy season. However, even for those with the necessary tools, there is the added burden of inflated fuel prices. The implication of all this on the food situation is indeed grave.

Clearly, this province and other strife-torn areas will need vast sums of money to restore their productivity to previous levels. For now, though, the most critical task is the restoration of peace.

Communities at war with each other will need to be brought together by a selfless leadership. This will entail taking a candidly hard look at outstanding grievances like the distribution of resources. This would signal the beginning of a process of trust and the healing the ugly wounds that have been opened by the violence. But all this is unlikely to happen as long as the current political standoff continues.

Quelques mots tires de la presse kenyane de ce jour...reflexion face a une dure realite...

May voice of reason rescue Kenya

When two bulls fight, goes the old saying; it is the grass that suffers. The grass here is the ordinary people of Kenya who have been reduced to expendable cannon fodder as the rich and powerful duel for political supremacy.

Voices of reason on both sides must move swiftly to isolate dangerous demagogues in their midst and drive a process that will lead Kenya back to peace, justice and national reconciliation.

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Ce texte est paru dans la presse kenyane ce jour. Note d'espoir et de deceptions meles, comme le ressentent beaucoup de Kenyans apres des resultats contestes d'elections tumultueuses.
Je vous laisse a la lecture de ce texte dans son integralite.

POUR REFLEXION

We can resolve dispute peacefully

I am a young man who believes in this country and participated in the just-concluded General Election as a voter and parliamentary candidate.

Today, I write, disappointed, as I watch my dream of a united and prosperous Kenya slowly turning into a nightmare. Sadly, in a case of misdirected emotions, we have turned against each other and are perpetuating all forms of atrocities.

I mourn, for political differences need not lead to loss of life, neither do we deserve the pain and suffering endured in the past weeks.

I mourn all innocent lives lost due to intolerance and misdirected emotion. I mourn the violence visited on innocent children and women. I mourn the seeds of hatred and distrust that have been planted in the minds of Kenyans. I mourn lost investments and looted property all under the guise of “political anger”.

For the sake of this country, I call for peace and pray that all concerned parties will heed my call for peace.

I plead peace on behalf of our children and women — innocent victims of this dispute. I plead peace on behalf of displaced families, who will spend another night in the discomfort of a police station, church or exhibition centre. I plead peace on behalf of Kenyans who are going without basic commodities due to insecurity. I plead peace on behalf of thousands who require a peaceful environment to earn their daily bread. I plead peace on behalf of our neighbours who lack essential commodities due to the dispute in Kenya.

I am sure we have the capacity to resolve our disputes peacefully, and cannot afford any more senseless loss of life. All leaders have a responsibility to this nation and must take the lead in calming the people, while we seek peaceful ways of resolving the impasse.

Fellow Kenyans, we have lived together for so many years and cannot let events of a single day and actions of a few individuals shake our foundation, and bring disunity amongst us.

Let us calm down, view each other as brothers and sisters and let peace prevail.

Ce texte est paru dans la presse kenyane ce jour. Note d'espoir et de deceptions meles, comme le ressentent beaucoup de Kenyans apres des resultats contestes d'elections tumultueuses.
Je vous laisse a la lecture de ce texte dans son integralite.

POUR REFLEXION

Kenyans are fighting inequality, not ethnicity

As every middle and upper class Nairobian will tell you, one of the most irritating things about the violence that rocked Kenya in the week after the elections was the fact that many maids, guards and nannies did not show up at work for a whole week.

This was not because they were protesting over their inhuman working conditions or low salaries; it was because many of their shacks had been burned and some were actually living as refugees in various government facilities within the city. Others lived in notoriously dangerous slum areas that had been cordoned off by militia or police.

Yet all I heard from my well-to-do friends, relatives and neighbours in my neck of the woods was how awful it was to do the housework without help, what with all the children in the house during the holidays, and the piles of clothes that needed washing.

NEITHER THEY NOR I BORE THE brunt of the violence that rocked all of Nairobi’s slums and some parts of the country last week. We all live in areas where killing your neighbours is not only considered bad manners but bad for business.

We don’t look at each other through ethnic eyes, though we do sometimes wonder if the muhindi in Block C bought a new Mercedes through corruption money or if the Luo woman down the road believes in witchcraft.

We decried the inhumanity of Nairobi’s wretched slum dwellers, who we concluded were tribalists who could not see the big picture. Why, we wondered, couldn’t they remove their ethnic blinkers and see how their activities were affecting tourism and the Nairobi Stock Exchange? And why, for God’s sake, were they not reporting for work?

Foreign correspondents, who transmitted the violence in Nairobi’s slums for all the world to see, were quick to describe what was happening in Kenya as ethnic cleansing. Like my friends, relatives and neighbours, they totally ignored the social, economic and political forces that were plunging Kenya into mayhem.

They failed to see that the main reason for the violence and protests around the country was not because one ethnic group wanted to forcibly take over the presidency from another ethnic group, but because Kenyans perceived the elections to be unfair.

More importantly, they failed to realise that the root causes of the violence had more to do with the economic and political reality of Kenya than it had to do with ethnic chauvinism (although all three are linked in the Kenyan context, as I will explain).

Kenya is one of the most unequal societies in the world. Ten per cent of the country’s 35 million people control 42 per cent of the nation’s wealth, leaving nearly half of the country’s population to subsist below the poverty line.

Inequalities within cities such as Nairobi are stark; Nairobi’s ethnically diverse slums, rated as the biggest and most deprived slums in the world, service some of the wealthiest homes and neighbourhoods in Africa.

Inequality tends to manifest itself ethnically and regionally, with some ethnic groups and regions benefiting more from public resources than others.

Because the current constitution bestows enormous powers on the executive and because there are no constitutional provisions to ensure equitable distribution of the country’s resources, various presidents have used their powers to accumulate ill-gotten wealth for themselves and their cronies (usually from their own ethnic group), and to allocate disproportionate public resources to projects and regions of their choice (usually to regions where their ethnic base is strongest).

Kenya’s struggle is, therefore, more fundamentally linked to inequity than to ethnicity, although wealth and poverty have developed distinctly ethnic tones.

MORE THAN ANYTHING ELSE, THIS election was seen by the poor and the marginalised as the one that would address past injustices and regional inequalities. In essence, the violence that erupted after the elections was a class war — one in which the impoverished masses took up arms against all those they thought represented the interests of the ruling class, in this case, some of their neighbours, regardless of their political affiliation and despite the fact that some of these neighbours were as dirt poor as they were.

It is no wonder then that the most impoverished parts of the country witnessed some of the most violent clashes. What was most tragic about the violence was that Kenya’s dispossessed, instead of uniting to demand justice and equity, turned on each other.

But as the country counts its human and economic losses, there are glimmers of hope and solidarity emerging. As one woman who lives in Nairobi’s Kawangware slum told me: “I know that when my child gets sick, I can’t call my MP to take him to hospital. I have to call my neighbours. In the end, I have to rely on them to save my child.”

Story by RASNA WARAH
Rasna Warah is currently an editor with the United Nations. The views expressed here are her own and do not necessarily reflect those of the UN. This opinion is part of a collection put together by Concerned Kenyan Writers, a coalition of writers formed to save Kenya in these polarised times in the country’s history.

Ce texte est paru dans la presse kenyane ce jour. Note d'espoir et de deceptions meles, comme le ressentent beaucoup de Kenyans apres des resultats contestes d'elections tumultueuses.
Je vous laisse a la lecture de ce texte dans son integralite.

POUR REFLEXION

We need to address children’s plight urgently

UNICEF, the UN agency responsible for ensuring the welfare of children throughout the world, estimates that post-election violence has displaced at least 100,000 children in Kenya.

Together with their families, the children have been sleeping in police stations, church compounds and show grounds where existence is informed by a host of indignities that go side by side with homelessness.

With primary schools set to open tomorrow, now is an appropriate time to reflect on the plight of those children. A new school year marks an important milestone in the life a child. It is critical in determining the pathway to the future in a dynamic and competitive world where there is no substitute for education and the attendant skills.

Sadly, for those displaced children who should be in school, tomorrow is neither a happy nor a hopeful day. Their immediate future is threatened by intransigent circumstances way beyond their control.

Scores of schools have been razed the ground, and even where they have been left standing, the volatile atmosphere rules out the possibility that the children will be returning home for a long time to come.

Given the violent circumstances under which the children and their families were uprooted from their homes, school materials like books and uniforms have been lost. Reduced to destitution, their parents can hardly be expected to replace them.

And the politically-driven violence has not spared teachers either.

Some of them have been killed while others have fled with their families. It is unlikely that they would be willing to go back to their work stations until peace prevails and their security can be guaranteed.

All this points to a situation where these displaced children will certainly be absent from school. There is nothing to indicate that the government is seriously working out ways of ensuring that they will be able to report to a school tomorrow.

It is nowhere near adequate to request that displaced parents take their displaced children to the school nearest to their place of refuge. As it is, thanks to free primary education, schools are already congested.

Classrooms are bursting, and the teacher-pupil ratio has been stretched to the limit, making quality learning elusive.

It also important to bear in mind that many schools in the violence-torn areas have been turned into refugee camps for displaced families. So the additional challenges arises of providing alternative shelter for the displaced to create room in time for the commencement of learning tomorrow.

Many children have been separated from their parents in the mayhem. This situation is made worse by the fact that provincial education departments in the areas of conflicts are yet to resume work, so accurate information on absent children is not readily available.

Hungry children wandering around on their own face many dangers and are particularly vulnerable to child traffickers and pedophiles.

Children separated from their parents and lucky enough to find their way to refugee camps might find themselves in a situation where they will be ill-informed of availability of opportunities in the absence of adults close enough to watch out for their interest.

The displaced camps are poor substitutes for homes. Stories coming out them paint a gloomy picture of hunger, lack of adequate clothing and shelter.

We are talking of young souls whose innocence and sense of security have been profoundly shattered. Some of them have witnessed the killing of their parents and siblings. Others have witnessed their playmates being killed. Their homes, their last lines of security, have been burned before their eyes.

Besides proclaming their commitment to peace, the protagonists in this whole saga need to go out and assure those children of the rapid resumption of lives that have been arrested mid-stream. They need to guarantee them that they will never again suffer because of the politics of the day. They owe the children this much.