Re: "Reducing poverty through tourism"

Massa, I read your brilliant article, with considerable interest. Over the years, many concerned people in Ghana (including even simple and uneducated folk like me), have written countless articles about the potential of community-based eco-tourism – which have all fallen on deaf ears in officialdom, unfortunately.

Let us hope that President-elect Mills’ new National Democratic Congress (NDC) regime will take note of yours.

There are many innovative and hard-working tour companies in Ghana doing great work to help boost that vital industry. One such leading eco-tour company, is M&J Travel and Tours Limited, which through its Akwantupa Travel Foundation, has worked closely over the years, with conservation organisations using community-based eco-tourism as a tool for conservation.

Amongst the conservation organisations that M&J Travel and Tours has been working with to promote eco-tourism in Ghana are: A Rocha Ghana; the Ghana Wildlife Society (GWS); the Nature Conservation Research Centre (NCRC); the Dutch development organisation SNV and the Wildlife Division of the Forestry Commission of Ghana.

So dedicated is this highly-innovative and leading green Ghanaian company to the development of the tourism industry that it has been sponsoring some of those conservation organisations to attend tourism fairs in Europe, since 2004.

Due to the fact that you appear to be so enthusiastic about the industry in your article, I will recount a cautionary tale that also happens to be a rather interesting personal experience of mine, which might be of interest to you: and could perhaps help guide you going forward into the future.

Sadly, at a certain point in time in the past, whiles a simple and harmless soul like me was busy collaborating with that dynamic Ghanaian eco-tour company, M&J Travel and Tours and its UK associate, Hands Up Holidays, to bring the noted UK journalist Ian Burrel of The Independent on Sunday to Ghana during the 2008 CAF football tournament, some of my own fellow journalists took it upon themselves to go on the usual “pull-him-down-syndrome” frenzy of negativity that some Ghanaians so love to engage in.

Incredibly, although I was a complete stranger to them, they slandered me by trying to make out to people in the UK that I was some kind of a conman – who ought to be ignored by all involved in that noble enterprise.

Yet, I, whose love for country cannot be questioned, was only doing it for altruistic reasons (to do with my sense of patriotism) without expecting any financial reward - and in the end that brilliant UK writer came and eventually wrote a lovely travelogue about our beautiful nation, which appeared on page 68 of the 10th February, 2008 edition of The Independent on Sunday.!

In my humble view, if the new Mills administration were to appoint the dynamic John Mason, the Nature Conservation and Research Centre's executive director, as the new deputy minister for tourism, it will make a huge difference to the growth of the industry - which really ought to be made a tax-free sector of our economy to enable all the businesses that work in that vital industry eventually thrive.

Perhaps if you look up the October 2007 edition of the online newsletter of Sustainable Travel International (STI) you will find an example of one of my articles about community-based eco-tourism’s potential to alleviate rural poverty and create real wealth for people living at the grassroots level in it, which might be of interest to your good self!

I also have countless emails of correspondence between myself and a close relation of the cultured and well-spoken lady who served as the last tourism minister in the NPP regime, which provided them with creative solutions that could help green the industry to benefit the players in the industry in particular and corporate Ghana generally, if they adopted them.

However, as is usual with such things to do with our largely unimaginative political class, the minister wasn’t able to find time from her rather busy schedule to email even a thank- you note to the insignificant and silly old fool, Kofi Thompson, who clearly had nothing better to do than want to see some progress in the tourism sector that wasn’t going to benefit some of Ghana’s clever politicians personally!

Some of my most discouraging experiences with the various eco-tourism projects I have been personally involved in occurred in the Byzantine world of tourism in the Hohoe District Assembly – where the dissimulating district officials I came across must definitely occupy the leading position amongst the world’s public officials who speak with forked-tongues. I have seldom come across such deviousness in all my life!

Some of the leading public officials concerned with tourism in that district gave one the distinct impression that they acted solely with self-interest at the fore of their minds – and had no time for principled and altruistic fools who laboured under the illusion that public service was about pursuing the public good: instead of actively feathering one’s own nest whiles in office.

My prayer is that going forward into the future, the players in the tourism industry in the Hohoe district, will no longer be saddled with such self-seekers (whose every move had conflict of interest clearly plastered all over it) again – as the new Mills administration takes over the running of our beautiful and fascinating country.

May God bless and protect our homeland Ghana, always. Long live freedom! Long live Ghana!