The Uganda President has attacked the Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) and the Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) over failure to market Uganda tourism internationally.
The president attacked the bodies during a conference at Serena hotel arguing that the two only promotes specific animals like Mountain Gorillas leaving the beauty in parks.
He admitted that marketing mountain gorillas is good but they also need to market the beauty of other Uganda national parks. He noted that there is no reason why tourists should only be coming in Uganda for gorilla tracking and go to other neighboring countries like Kenya and Tanzania to see wildlife as buffaloes, lions, elephants when Uganda has plenty of these in her national parks such as Murchison falls national park, Queen Elizabeth national park among others.
The President called the general manager of UTB, Mr Cuthbert Baguma, to explain why they only have promotions of mountain gorillas but he was speechless.
He lashed out at UWA for being ruthless while evicting people from national parks.He said people should be told that the revenue from tourism is better than that from farming and link them to park hotels to buy their crafts instead of ordering them off park land like they have no stake in Uganda.
“I need to see these confused UWA people. Telling people to vacate for better revenue does not need much thinking,” he said.
He urged UWA officials to design proper user-friendly methods of ordering people to leave national parks than using a lot of force to evict them.
