The Uganda Wildlife Authority is launching a project that will see it, directly engage in the business of taking tourists to wildlife destinations across the country.

In bid to achieve the cause, UWA placed newspaper adverts so as to outsource bids from prospective suppliers of five buses capable of transporting tourists to national parks. This development was met by negative responses from private tour operators, who reckoned that UWA’s joining the business of tour service provision is not right.

The UWA plan
While interviewing Jossy Muhangi UWA spokesman, the governing body has plans to directly take tourists to national parks, which is part of a sector-wide initiative funded by the World Bank with the aim of increasing both private and public efforts to develop Uganda’s tourism industry.

He further mentions other strategies in the project as the setting up of more recreational facilities in the parks, establishment of more viewer-oriented vehicles and boats in the parks, modernising of the gates in the national parks, upgrading the signage and other directional features in the parks, further rolling-out of a smart-card system where visitors to the parks do all bookings and payments electronically, among others.

On particularly acquiring buses, Muhangi reveals that UWA has decided to initially acquire five of them, which they will allocate to five of the major parks and stations around Kampala so that every two or three days, people who have made bookings can be taken to the parks. He adds that the buses should be in operation in three months’ time.

A number of private tour operators’ resentment of UWA’s proposed buses has been, especially, premised on the argument that UWA will make for unfair competition and even possibly push them out of business. They argue that UWA runs the national parks and also has resources to operate on a very large scale, which private operators cannot afford.

According to the chairman of the Uganda Tourism Association – Herbert Byaruhanga,, contends that UWA’s involvement will actually kill private initiative, and thereby kill innovation and resource optimisation in the sector.

However, Samuel Sanya, the director of Tourism at UWA, says private operators should not see UWA as competition. Because UWA is not coming into the market to operate on a large scale to make profits, but rather to operate on a small scale and mainly to promote local tourism.
Stressing that they are initially introducing only five buses in a sector that needs more than 100 buses, Sanya says UWA’s primary motive is to give more Ugandans a chance to see their country’s wildlife endowment and to appreciate the conservation efforts, so the numbers of local tourists can rise.

“We especially need the numbers of local tourists to rise so that the country has potential to rely on local tourists to finance its conservation efforts, especially during the times when there is a dip in foreign visitors, say when some negative publicity has made them come in less numbers for a few months,” Sanya says, adding, “Yet private people cannot take the initiative for this because their primary concern is to make profit, not necessarily to promote the industry as a whole.”

But Byaruhanga argues that the way to fix the problem of low local tourist numbers is not by UWA directly getting involved in the conveyance of visitors to destination, rather mass sensitisation.

Although figures from the Uganda Bureau of Statistics indicate that the number of local tourists visiting the parks has been steadily rising over the last few years, the numbers are still low.

Only about 35 per cent of average total of 200,000 annual visitors to the parks over the last three years have been Ugandans. UWA’s Sanya says since local tourists actually pay just Shs15,000 to enter the parks as compared to foreigners who pay $40 (about Shs120,000), the numbers of local tourists really need to rise.

However, Byaruhanga emphasizes: “UWA is a government agency, and its mandate is to conserve wildlife and avail an enabling environment, not to compete with the private operators. We will not let them come in to compete with us, we are going to oppose them and protest and even petition the President.”

But perhaps Frank Lyazzi, the principal tourism officer at the Ministry of Tourism, has the best advice for now: “As UWA has made it clear that it is coming in primarily to encourage local tourism, to make our destinations more marketable and accessible to Ugandans, let us give them a chance and see how they go about it. In case they turn out to be adverse competition to private operators, the whole program can be reviewed.”