On her recent historic visit to Kenya, Tanzanian President Suluhu Hassan, speaking in proverbs, seemed to suggest that one of the broad areas of potential collaboration between Kenya and her country was in tourism.
She mentioned specifically the wildebeest, which famously cross into Kenya’s Maasai Mara Game Reserve every year, and later return to Tanzania’s more famous Serengeti National Park.
It was a shrewd hint. For if indeed such collaboration is institutionalised then the big winner will be Tanzania.
Using Kenya’s superior infrastructure as an entry point for a visit to the Serengeti or the Ngorongoro Conservation Area (a World Heritage Site in Northern Tanzania) would attract greater revenues and create more employment in Tanzania, than in Kenya.
Let me explain:
Occasionally you will come across an estimate of what some developing country’s potential wealth might be.
How much the petroleum reserves of Venezuela are valued at, for example.
Or how much the mineral wealth of DR Congo would add up to if the mining thereof was properly regulated.
Now when it comes to Kenya’s safari tourism (as opposed to beach resort tourism, even though the two are often sold as a package) the significant question is, 'How much wilderness do you have?'
The reason for this is that tourists do not embark on an iconic 'African safari' in the expectation of ending up in a Land Cruiser, which is one of 20 such cars surrounding a family of cheetahs, on a morning game drive.
What they want (and are willing to pay more for) is 'a true wilderness experience', which basically means lots of wild animals and few, if any, people around to share the view with them.
Now there is a strange paradox here. On the one hand, we as a country need more and more tourists because the sector helps in job creation at multiple levels.
But we cannot just randomly expand the total number of such camps and lodges to accommodate more tourists.
What could arguably be called a 'wilderness' when there is just one lodge or camp within hundreds of rolling acres of pristine savannah grasslands, teeming with wildlife, quickly ceases to be wilderness once you have licensed a few dozen additional lodges and camps within this area.
The need for more tourists (and by implication, more camps and lodges, more jobs for locals, etc) has to be weighed against the fact that the wildlife-filled landscapes they come here to see, will only remain a wilderness if you limit how many people get to visit it at any one time.
So, how much wilderness do we have in Kenya? And how much does Tanzania, our most likely challenger in providing 'the African safari experience' have?
Referring specifically to designated parks, in Kenya there are 61 national parks and national reserves. The area for wildlife conservation is about 44,359 square kilometres or 7.5 per cent of the total area of the republic (582,644 sq kilometres).
If you remove the one big park we have in Kenya, Tsavo, then what the country has is small scattered disconnected tiny islands of protected habitat. In Tanzania, the present network of wildlife Protected Areas is comprised of 15 national parks, Ngorongoro Conservation Area, 33 game reserves and 43 game controlled areas.
The Wildlife Protected Areas network covers 233,300 Sq Km (28 per cent) of the total Tanzania's land surface area.
In other words, 28 per cent of the country is set aside for national parks, conservation areas, game reserves, and controlled and protected areas.
And of course, Tanzania is a much bigger country than Kenya.
As such, if you were to set aside within Kenya the same size of protected land that Tanzania has (ie, 233,300 Sq Km) it would take up roughly 40 per cent of our total 582,644 Sq kilometres landmass.
So, if we are to go strictly by the numbers, Tanzania is the giant to the south, which in the end is destined to overtake Kenya as a premier wildlife safari destination.
Especially if Kenyan tour operators are allowed to market visits to the Serengeti, and the Ngorongoro Conservation Area, from an operational base within the Maasai Mara Game Reserve.
