The tourism officials say the communication by the army was bad for business as it kept foreign travellers away from the country.

The Uganda Tourism Board (UTB) has thus requested for Shs5b to engage international media in order to counter the threat posed to Uganda’s tourism sector, following the pronouncement by UPDF that the ADF rebels had infiltrated into Uganda, with an intention to carry out revenge attacks.

UTB said that tourists have already started cancelling their bookings following these reports.

Early this week, the army said a number of top ADF commanders had crossed into the country with intentions of attacking various places.

Last year, ADF rebels killed two tourists and a driver in Queen Elizabeth National Park.

The army later said those who commanded the attack had been killed.

Whereas the army said they had no option but to warn the public because it would be worse if the rebels killed more people, UTB was of a divergent view.

Lilly Ajarova, the UTB CEO, said: “So now, we have to counter that and that means, from that press release we are going to get more negative travel advisories that will come up, so we must be able to counter that by bringing more international media people who can be able to verify that it is safe and then they are able to report back.”

Renowned tourism guru Amos Wekesa said: “I am a strong believer in the potential of UPDF to deal with any situation in this country and it’s for two reasons; They have some of the best trained professionals plus they get a big part of tax payers money.

But the continuous use of the word terrorism kills business.

Leadership spends so much efforts looking for foreign investors but continues to undermine their own efforts.

Foreign investors also come for business and a country that continues to communicate badly can mainly attract those who use our money to risk investments.
The moment the word terrorism is used, insurance is rendered useless, the embassies issue negative travel advisories.

That affects uganda as a tourism destination plus no business traveler wants to come to uganda.

Conferences coming to Uganda are channeled elsewhere.

The last four years have had COVID19, Ebola, ADF etc and we haven’t worked industry which is sad.

We have struggled keeping jobs.

Next year is dead because it’s a political year and this was the only year we were hoping to use to save to keep businesses afloat.

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The legislators said Tuesday they wouldn’t accept ‘landing themselves in problems’ by trying to defend an exorbitant figure they know nothing about.

The MPs expressed worry that the high figure might be used to buy lions which might not even give birth.

They further said a private breeder in Butambala was keeping more lions at a lower cost compared to the figure quoted by UWEC.

See dialogue below

Richard Gafabusa MP (Bwamba County): With Shs10Bn, how many additional lions do we expect? This is (money) for one financial year. So, if we give you Shs10Bn beginning July 2024, by June 2025, how many additional lions?

David Musingo, Acting ED-UWEC: The starting stock, we shall get 4 female (lioness) and one male (lion). We shall get 8 with two males. We are going to have like two areas, where we have 4 lions in each, those are eight females. Now, there is a probability of getting pregnant.

Mwine: So, we might invest and they don’t get pregnant?

Musingo: For us they get pregnant. In fact, the lions we have are on family planning.

Mwine: So how do we account for the taxpayers’ money when the lion fails to get pregnant?

Witness: But through genetics, you select the viable population. Chairperson, I want to be protected, I know we are going to be invited. We have the international community where we have what we call Animal Fundamentalists trying to shoot down this project and we are going to defend it during the dialogue where we shall share all those nitty gritty.

Mwine: You are here for a budget, you have to defend this budget before us and we defend it before Parliament.

Witness: I hope the journalists aren’t arming the fundamentalists to shoot us.

From our experience, once you have lions from a controlled environment, if it is in the wild, other factors are at play, you may have zero probability.

But for us we are very sure, once we create the boomers, they are going to produce.

The other time we got one female producing five from UWEC. So, on average they are two, that is the assurance we can give you.

Mwine: This man CTC Conservation Centre in Mpigi, he started with 4 lions, in a period of 1year, he has 26 lions.

And those 26 lions are eating 1ton every two weeks and we did a rough estimate, he is spending around Shs390M in a year but here we are looking at Shs10b and we are getting 16 lions.

Witness: I need you to look at how those lions are coming in, maybe you will discover more information.

Mwine: How do they come in? By a boat? You mean he isn’t breeding?

Witness: Me all I request is more investigation to be done. UWEC will never do things not according to science, we use systematic methods the way we do things. All documentation is there to show how we do our things.

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