A unit of 120 police officers was unveiled last week to protect and ensure safety of all tourists in Uganda. According to Mr. Ephraim Kamuntu, the Tourism minister, the need for a Tourism Police force came as a result of several complaints about tourists losing property to motor cycle riders (boda boda), tour operators, tour guides and some getting mugged in hotels. “We want to make sure that under Justice Law and Order Sector, cases involving tourists are hurriedly disposed off before they return home.

This will save Uganda a bad image to the outside world,” noted Kamuntu. He decried the conduct of the political pressure group Activists for Change (A4C) through their walk to work demos as hurting the tourism sector. “When they carry out their activities they scare away tourists,” he noted.

Kamuntu said tourism, the world’s most traded commodity and Uganda’s second foreign exchange earner at $662m behind remittances, cannot be left unattended to as an unregulated sector. He urged members of the Kampala City Traders’ Association (KACITA), who recently conducted a sit down strike to work with the tourism fraternity to ensure that some of their concerns like depreciation of the shilling can be addressed through attracting more tourists who bring in more foreign exchange to strengthen the Shilling.

Mr. Amos Wekesa, the president of the Uganda Tourist Association, said Uganda can earn up to $5b from tourism attractions like River Nile, if it’s well marketed. “Egypt earns about $3b from the Nile alone. But in Uganda, where we have the Source of the Nile, nothing is got from the river,” stressed Wekesa before calling for an emergency tourism marketing budget for Uganda.

Uganda, which was the top tourism destination in East African in the 1960s, lost its glory to Kenya due to the many civil wars it had. The revamping of the tourism sector which started in the early 1990s hit a snag in 1999 when about eight British tourists were killed in Bwindi Impenetrable National Park by suspected Rwandan rebels believed to have come from the jungles of the Democratic Republic of Congo.

Its revival has been ongoing since then, and this has seen a tremendous growth with Uganda now targeting about 1.2 million tourists this year. This is the year when internationally respected number one travel magazine Lonely Planet voted Uganda the world’s top destination.

Uganda will also participate in the upcoming International Tourism Bourse in Berlin. According to Mr. Cuthbert Baguma, the executive director of the Uganda Tourism Board, they have hired a private public relations firm to ensure that over 80 media stations in Germany relay information about Uganda. The number of German tourists to Uganda has grown over years, from 5,000 in 2006 to 39,000 in 2011.