Why We Need to Train our Fish to Nibble on People’s Toes

A version of this was published in the Business Daily on 31 December 2013 at http://www.businessdailyafrica.com/Opinion-and-Analysis/Kenya-should-train-fish-to-nibble-on-toes/-/539548/2129642/-/ldm1wk/-/index.html

A friend of ours came to visit us the other day. She had come back a few weeks ago from a holiday in Malaysia, and was eager to regale us with stories about her trip. Since life nowadays is not as simple as when you would pull out snapshots of your week in a bad motel, she showed us video on her phone of some of the exploits. In one of the videos, her feet were getting nibbled on by tiny fish. This is a controversial craze – doctors claim that the fish can help spread infections from one client to another – but it is proving quite popular.

My interest, though, was not in the nibbly fish – I happen to be a tad ticklish. It was in the fact that the fish are located in a Malaysian holiday resort, and not a Kenyan one. The argument I’m about to make may be simplistic, but it is an important one that needs to be made for the sake of the country’s economy, and for the sake of an important sector in that economy.

For the past three years, whenever a media invite comes across my desk, asking me to send a reporter to cover the release of the latest tourist statistics by the relevant government minister, I groan inwardly. The reason is that the resultant story is so predictable, so repetitive, that the reporter can write his or her script before they even leave Nation Centre. The story will be how Kenya has just achieved (or just come up short of) the target of a million tourists a year. The minister will go on to proclaim an ambitious new target (for the mid-future, incidentally) of three million tourists a year. An earnest proclamation will follow, of how Kenya finally needs to diversify her tourist product from the traditional beach, bush and parks, to a strategy to showcase the other parts of this beautiful country.

But the nibbly fish in Langkawi show us what the problem is with these announcements. We have treated our tourism offering the way we have treated our agriculture products. Kenya produces the greatest coffee and tea in the world, and we seem to have settled on that fact to assume that the world will then beat a path to our front door to take it off our hands. The same assumption applies to our country. We still have some of the whitest, purest beaches in the world, and a stroll on the sands in the South Coast are enough to make you believe in romance. Our wildlife, when it is not being decimated, is still the most impressive sight on earth. Unlike the Kruger National Park in South Africa, where you need to peer through bushes to catch a glimpse of the Big Five, the Maasai Mara is truly Big Sky Country, where you can see for countless miles, and spot a sleeping lion from five kilometres away.

Yet the Kruger receives 950,000 visitors a year, almost as many as visit the whole of Kenya (those numbers announced by our Tourism Minister in those regular press conferences).

We’re still stuck with the mindset that not only will our superior product speak for itself and attract the relevant numbers, but that we do not need to add any value to it – visitors will be blown away anyway by the magnificence of our beauty. Which is why the vast majority of Kenyan hotels, restaurants and other tourist facilities are so insipid. Back to those South Coast beaches: Many of the hotels attached to them seem to have given up the fight. Stay in them and you will get depressed – unmotivated staff, dead air-conditioning, decaying infrastructure, uninspired food and, often, a gentle undercurrent of racism suffusing through the entire experience. While some hotels are trying, it only takes one visit to, yes, a Malaysian, or American, or even South African resort to realise how much work there is to be done.

And we do not have our version of the nibbly fish. Often, the limit of our added value is tired-looking ‘Maasai’ dancers, or the mud at Lamu that was immortalised by frolicking MPs a few years ago.

Of course, it’s not all a depressed picture. At the high end of the Kenyan tourist market, there are some quite impressive offerings. Some of the private conservancies on the Laikipia plateau are unbeatable for any price, anywhere. And some entrepreneurs have realised that the weekend urban warrior can be one of the most lucrative customers anywhere, and are starting to develop facilities in places like Naivasha to cater for them. Remember the million-or-so visitors to the Kruger? 80 percent of those are South Africans, who hop into their cars and drive themselves to the country’s north to see the Big Five for themselves.

We need to remember that a traveller standing at an airport desk in Dubai, Frankfurt, Istanbul or London can throw a pin within eight hours of flying time and hit impressive tourist offerings that are lining up to take tourists away from Kenya. So let us teach our fish how to nibble, and our tourism planners to enjoy the experience.