Since colonial era, Tanzania had been highly rated in Africa as commanding unparalleled tourism potential on the continent. South Africa could follow from some distant behind, yet in terms of range of attractions, social and political stability, we are still standing atop.

Unfortunately, for the past forty years or so, this hidden treasure had not been given sufficient institutional and spatial support in order to make it a paramount foreign exchange earner.

Much so, it missed the most important private sector jerk during the past quarter century of socialist experimentation, when everything was state-run.

Infrastructure collapse brought untold damage to the growth of the industry in which physical and human attributes are scattered to a geographical space of close to 900,000 square kilometres.

However, the most deadly virus that has bedeviled tourism sector for many years is lack of professionalism at national and enterprise levels.

Disgusting as it has been, we passively tolerated for so many years about concerted deceptive and grossly misleading international promotion campaigns which had all along been claiming that the ice-clad Mount Kilimanjaro's geographical location was somewhere else and not exactly in Tanzania.

Well, in the world where globalisation dictates most of the business trends, it would be naive to expect a perfectly smooth environment for all players to ride fairly.

The straight message we are trumpeting hinges on the fact that global service industry, especially hospitality industry, is delicately competitive.
All manner of business skills, sometimes outright 'dictatorships' and retaliations can be expected.

Apparently, it is possible to hire service companies to carry out international promos, but not that every skill could be immediately hired at all. Some have to be manufactured at home.

That is the reason we are saying kudos to the government for its noble resolve to build a tourism university college in Bagamoyo right from this financial year.

We can only hope that with assistance from the World Trade University, in the next decade, we shall have trained an indigenous critical mass of skilled hotel managers, researchers, consulting firms and service providers for the industry.

These skills will speed up the already attained momentum in the sector which was late last year the leading foreign exchange earning sector for the economy.

Most attractively, by having indigenous skills at hand, investors in hospitality industry will have no reason to hire similar skills from abroad, which is a more expensive option.

Instead, they will conveniently fumble for skills from the domestic market, and over the longer runs, benefits generated by the industry would be retained at home, thus powering the economy even to higher heights.

In practice, tourism is not labour intensive, yet it is highly skill intensive.

We can definitely bet that foreign investments would remain to be major source of key facilities, while indigenous skills would be running the show.



Source:http://www.ippmedia.com