Lift pole. Cross hands. Dunk. Push. It is just another day at the office for polers (Mokoro guides). Using a long stick-pole they stir the waters of the exquisitely majestic Okavango Delta to ferry high rolling tourists from wetland to dryland ÔÇô traversing the meandering palm and papyrus fringed waterways, passing palm-fringed islands, and thick woodland, resplendent with lush vegetation, and teeming with wildlife.
Onalethata Radipitse knows this life all too well. His hands have swirled the Delta waters for more than half his life. Three months into 2016, Radipitse, however, gave it all up; evocative scenes of extraordinary natural beauty, rich and famous clients and the tourists dollars to spend the reminder of his life chasing cattle and trying to scratch a living from Botswana dry and unforgiving land.
“It was just too hard to live only off tourist dollars”, says Radipitse who was employed as a professional guide at one of the luxury camps dotting the Delta.
“If you consider mokoro poling as the only source of living without any other alternative streams of income, such is not life, it’s necessary to combine it with suitably better ideas, and use it as a vehicle to reach where you want to go, if you only focus on it you will not build a life.”
Radipitse’s decision to throw up his hands, stop chasing the illusive tourist dollar and place himself at the mercy of Botswana’s erratic rainfall illustrates how hard it still is for locals to make a living from tourism in Maun. This is despite decades of government efforts to ensure that local communities cash in from the lucrative sector. In 2014, tourism directly supported 4.6 percent of Botswana employment, or 10.1 percent including jobs that are indirectly supported by the industry, according to a report on Botswana from the World Travel and Tourism Report. By 2025, the travel group expects direct employment in tourism to rise to 5.3 percent, or 10.9 percent if indirect jobs are included.
The Okavango Delta offers a unique ecosystem crocheted with a diverse range of wild animals, birds and plants, making it a popular attraction to tourists. Bringing together the Delta poling
activities and the communities is the Okavango Kopano Mokoro Community Trust (OKMCT), a
trust registered in 1997 to ensure an equal distribution of tourists across the four mokoro
stations located in the villages that surround the Delta. The establishment of the Trust was motivated by the Community Based Natural Resources Management (CBNRM) policy introduced in 1990 as part of government’s efforts to involve locals in using natural resources in their communities so as to improve their standard of living.
Between 1997 and 2013 the Trust directly received revenue through three streams: one, rental
fees from tourism facilities established through joint venture partnerships with private investors;
two, hunting fees and three, entrance fees into the Delta. In 2014 government introduced changes to this revenue model. One, a hunting moratorium cut off revenue to OKMCT and two, rental fees now go directly to government and through its disbursement model it gives a share of it to the Trust. This leaves the Trust with significantly less earnings. Moreover, government identifies and negotiates with potential investors for concession land such as in the Delta (NG 32) by way of a bidding process through a system referred to as the Land Bank. Government says that negotiations are done on behalf of communities in the best interest of the community. “The land bank is purely established to ensure timely availability of tourism appropriate land for development,” it says. It sees the benefit to communities in the form of job creation and appropriate returns. The Trust’s Managing Director John Witness says the changes undermine the role of communities in managing and benefiting from their natural resources.
“The Trust feels the government is making decisions in regard to CBNRM without consultation
to the respective communities,” he says. He argues that it pushes communities further into poverty. Witness disclosed that there is mistrust between the communities and government which he attributed to the widening communication gap. He bemoaned that communities now struggle due to lack of funds which in the past were used in projects such as the construction of bridges linking the villages, of boreholes and well points; assisting with burial and funeral arrangements; collecting refuse and transporting the elderly, school children and sick patients.
The government says however that it has a good working relationship with the Trusts as it continues to support their operations. “The current unsatisfactory relationship with a few of the Community Trusts is dictated by the slow transition by some Trusts that were involved in
consumptive utilization of wildlife (hunting) which has been suspended. The frustration is known and understood.” it says. It adds that efforts are being made to train Trusts on tourism activities that don’t rely on hunting such as bird watching, photographic safaris and conservation trips.
However, Joseph Mbaiwa, a University of Botswana researcher who has published extensively on tourism activities in the Okavango Delta, says that the new land bank system has
disempowered some communities as they no longer have a say on who leases their land, thereby creating a top-down approach to tourism development. “Land ownership should be in
the hands of communities and citizen companies,” he says. He argues that giving citizen companies an upper edge will reverse revenue leakages observed in the sector which he blames on weak government policy and strategy in tourism development. “My suggestion here is that maybe we need to open up discussion on the Land Bank approach and see how it can involve communities in its decision making process and how they can best benefit from this approach if it is at all found useful,” he says.
Member of Parliament for Maun and also Paramount Chief Kgosi Tawana Moremi argues against the usefulness of CBNRM. He says the model blatantly ignored the socio-economic dynamics of the communities that were to form beneficiaries of the trusts due to the arbitrary demarcation and allocation of the concessions land. Moremi blames the Land Board for the flawed land demarcation. The role of the Land Board is to hold land in trust for the tribe as well as to allocate land to citizens and residents of Botswana for residential, commercial, agricultural and industrial use. “You get a Land Board that’s vested in managing this land, and holding it in custody for this community that does not know how these community areas were demarcated,” he says. Moremi also says that the land bank denies communities to benefit from their land. “If they (citizens) take it (land) to the market place and use that as a negotiating tool, that will ensure in the first instance that the business is based in Botswana, it will ensure that the money is paid to the business in Botswana, then you get 90 percent of revenue to be taxed here, to be disbursed from here, so the trickle effects start here,” he says.
Government in response to leakages says that it established ‘cluster coordination’ so as to make use of local supply chain. This means that a group of inter-connected firms, suppliers and related industries work together to support local tourism development. “It must however be noted that due to the importance of establishing global sales network, there will always be some level of leakage and the objective is to therefore minimise the inherent leakages,” it says.
((Documents obtained from National Archives and Records Services suggest that the direct participation of government in tourism development refutes the initial agreement with communities that its role will only be in the form of providing support. A response from M. C
Clark identified then as District Commissioner when asked by a community member if the government will have power over a then proposed park reads, “The government will have neither the wish nor the power to interfere with the proposed park, which will be the property of the tribe, to be run by them. The government will, if asked, give its advice but even this is not compulsory.”
Documents also suggest arbitrary allocation of concession land done by a consultant as had been commissioned by the Land Board, “In determining the width of the peripheral zone, decisions had to be made arbitrarily, – include village A but not B.” This indicates that no set
criteria had been applied in determining the beneficiaries for the concession land prior to Allocation.)
For Radipitse, the only thing that matters is that he can’t make a living from tourism. “It might seem at the end of the day that you had not been swirling the water when in actual fact you had spent your life laboring it,” says Radipitse. His life now is to look after his livestock.
