Contributing to the budget proposal from the Ministry of Environment, Tourism and Natural Resources Conservation, Vice President Slumber Tsogwane, lamented that big companies had dominated the lucrative Okavango Delta tourism for too long and that it was time they made way for Batswana.
Given who made that statement, one might think that at as a high level as the Office of the President, there is an active plan to break indigenous Batswana into a lily-white tourism business which, in normal times, attracts the patronage of Hollywood A-listers and European royalty. Far from it and Tsogwane knows the level of difficulty involved. The fact of the matter is that unless the government uses some Mugabesque, ZANU-PF-ish means, it is near impossible to dislodge whites from their tight control of Okavango Delta tourism.
The issue may involve blacks and whites but is not at all black and white. It may seem odd to some that in a country whose flag symbolically depicts blacks living harmoniously with whites, this issue is discussed in terms of black and white. That is because unless you use those terms, then you are not talking about Okavango Delta tourism.
This story of this tourism starts decades ago when indigenous Batswana and whites went in opposite directions. While well-off and worldly blacks rushed to bright city lights, whites went in the opposite direction and established commercial presence on vast tracts of land in the Okavango River. They then spent huge sums of money to build riverside lodges and thereafter, would only make brief visits to bright lights to lobby government officials for favourable policies. One such policy relates to a lease agreement that was obviously crafted with nefarious intent.
The lease agreement between the Tawana Land Board and tour operators contains a right-of-first-refusal clause. Right of refusal is a legal principle in terms of which a seller must give a party an opportunity to match a price at which a third party agrees to buy a specified asset on the same terms offered to the third party. When the lease for a concession area ends, all bidders, including the sitting tenant, compete in an open tender and upon evaluation, the latter is given the opportunity to match the overall highest bidder’s proposal. In the event the sitting tenant has to vacate a site, s/he has to be fully compensated for a site that would have been developed with huge sums of money over an extended period of time. In at least one case where a successful bidder could afford this compensation, the sitting tenant took the matter to the High Court, retaining the services of high-priced South African advocates.
It has been revealed that some Tawana Land Board officials wanted to give British tycoon Sir Richard Branson a concession area. Had that succeeded, Branson would have spent millions of pula to develop property that no indigenous Motswana would have been able to ever take over.
As long as this system remains in place, indigenous Batswana will find it extremely difficult to gain access to the country’s most lucrative tourist asset. As the situation stands, Mugabesque, ZANU-PF-ish means are the only answer but punishment from the west would be swift and vicious.
Some people have asserted that it is false to say that indigenous Batswana own a stake in Okavango Delta tourism through shareholding in companies listed on the Botswana Stock Exchange. This is mere semantic gymnastics because minimal ownership interest in a BSE-listed company that does business in the Okavango Delta is not the same as actually owning that company and making decisions that affect its operations and future. There is context in which complaining about lack of representation in the Delta is not unlike complaining that there are not enough poor people patronizing Phakalane nightclubs or buying groceries at Woolworths.
Delta tourism targets uncommonly deep-pocketed people – like Oprah Winfrey who has been spotted at the Maun International Airport clearing customs and immigration before getting back on her private jet. Oprah and other celebrities are attracted to the Delta by not just by the flora and fauna but also the quality of service they get. The foregoing provides context for discussing jets and quality of service as aspects of Okavango Delta tourism.
Motorists rightly complain about the Sehithwa-Shakawe Road whose potholes have become craters and will resemble open-pit mines in under five years. Those commenting on this sorry state of affairs often point out that this road should not be neglected because it connects Botswana to a tourist hot spot that brings in billions of pula. What they leave out is that people who can afford to shell out P20 000 a night for an Okavango Delta experience fly in and don’t travel by road. That is why the Maun Airport is the second busiest in Southern Africa.
The relevance of the latter point is that there will have to be real black economic empowerment to develop black entrepreneurs who can get into Delta tourism. By “black economic empowerment” we are merely restating what a former cabinet minister who is now diplomat, Duke Lefhoko, has stated in the past. Lefhoko stated that economic empowerment should target black Batswana. An administration that Tsogwane is part of lacks the courage to boldly state that it wants to economically empower black Batswana and actually do so.
Instead, it is still stuck on “citizen economic empowerment” which, come to think of it, has actually empowered people whom President Mokgweetsi Masisi calls “bo–rampeechane.” These people retain very strong links with their countries of origin and their knowledge of Setswana is tellingly and willfully limited to only two words: “pula” and “thebe.”
Despite the fact that black-owned hospitality establishments lag far behind in terms of quality of service, there has been no real substantive focus on this issue. Credit where it is due: the white people who run Delta businesses maintain extremely high customer service standards. Yes, it is their black employees who cook, clean and wait tables but the white owners have made substantial investments in the maintenance of those standards.
We can’t pretend to not know how huge a disappointment service standards are at one too many black-owned hospitality establishments. Each one of people who patronize or have patronized establishments in question have their own horror story to tell. The writer has stayed at a Gantsi guesthouse whose sitting room disappeared during the night – when the owner turned it into a bedroom to accommodate Namibians in town for the annual and hugely popular agricultural show. The owner and his wife, who lived at the guesthouse, freed up their own bedroom and slept in the (communal) kitchen. In the morning, he asked the writer to lend him P500 in order that he could buy alcohol stock to sell at the show. In Gaborone, far too many black-owned high-end restaurants have failed precisely because of poor service standards.
Tsogwane is right to state that black businesspeople should get into the lucrative Okavango Delta tourism business. However, in the next breath he should state that they need to maintain the world-class service standards that white operators have used to attract Hollywood. Alternatively, we can just pretend that everything is fine – which will be problematic when Oprah is required to cut a beef steak with a bread knife because the lodge has no steak knives. The latter actually happens at some supposedly high-end black-owned restaurants in Gaborone.
And how will the lives of ordinary black Batswana employees improve when fellow black Batswana own luxury lodges in the Delta? Sunday Standard has reported on how white operators exploit (and in some cases physically assault) their black employees. One too many black employers also exploit black employees. When they make millions from government’s empowerment schemes, they buy farms and elaborately-accessorised twin-cab Land Cruisers while industrial dispute cases that involve them pile up at the Department of Labour and the Industrial Court. The government that Tsogwane is part of needs to firm up labour protections (and increase the minimum wage) in order that Delta tourism can benefit black Batswana.
Tsogwane also failed to take the racism of main tourism markets for Botswana into consideration. On the same day that the writer was shaken down for a loan in Gantsi, he also met a white farmer at the local hotel who said something very interesting: that whites who visit Botswana do so because they know that other whites are in charge of the tourism business in Botswana. He may have been right because when the government developed a national brand for the country during President Festus Mogae’s administration, some westerners who were surveyed for the exercise said that Botswana was infamous for civil wars. For those white westerners, such fear would be allayed if another white person is inviting you to visit Botswana. That may be regressive but it is also how the world works.
