Financial Times

Tourism, stability and the election
By Random Access Memory (RAM)
Having broken the 500,000-tourist arrivals barrier as 'anticipated' on the last day of 2003, the Tourist Board reported that 50,000 foreign tourists visited Sri Lanka in the month of January 2004. The numbers are rounded, but the reality on the ground is that Sri Lanka is now once again re-establishing its roots in the main tourism markets as a much sought-after destination.

The two-year stoppage of sounding of the guns certainly helped bring tourism back once again to place it on the world's 'destinations of interest' list. Tours to Sri Lanka from the UK, France and several other destinations once advertised for cheap rates, are now seeing gradual increases.

Those who sought increases of the per capita earnings for Sri Lanka tourism from the low yield levels of US$ 63 to US$ 100, can now begin to smile and be acknowledged. Good spirited hard work done by some minions in the Tourist Board team, with extremely limited resources, is showing good results even before big money is spent by the international PR agencies to reposition Sri Lanka in the minds of the visitors as a 'Spirit of Travel' destination.

Our hope is that credit will be given to those who deserve it and not to persons and places in the bureaucracy or where the money spending apparatus was at work. Like in all things, consultants worked on plans and recommended that lots of money be spent on things and schemes to reinvent the obvious and what is already buried on the ground. 'Borrow your watches to tell you the time' is the truism at play, when it comes to the work of consultants.

Two weeks in Sri Lanka to discover our spirit and recommend to us that we must get the positioning that Mexico has been working on for sometime now. Well how many of us know what Mexico or for that matter most others do. In a fool's paradise, one can reign supreme. Most of the Western hemisphere is still cold and dreary.

The sun shines bright here in Sri Lanka, in spite of the games our politicians play being drunk with their hunger for power, yet claiming that all their effort is to give us all a damn good life. The hundreds of thousand migrant birds are still here, adorning the lagoons and the mangrove marshes, oblivion to the happenings around them.

The hotels are recording over 90% occupancies and hoteliers and their teams that suffered for survival for over twenty long years, are now smiling at last. They are brimming with hope, just like the many other millions, for a better future for Sri Lanka. For the first time in a long time, the sector is seeing decent incomes taken home by staff working in the various areas.

Tourism has been recognised as a key sector that every political grouping wants to develop in the future for there is strong potential for earning the much-needed foreign exchange and generating productive employment opportunities.

But what they all forget is that the key ingredient for all of that to be achieved is stability in the operating environment. We are blessed with an abundance of nature, culture and adventure resources. Our people are the most friendly and when equipped with the right skills can provide customer care of very high standards.

Where we 'shoot ourselves in the foot', is in the domain of creating situations of instability. We seem to have learnt nothing from the doom and gloom scenario of the past twenty over years. We still go at each other. We still get overwhelmed with our own rhetoric without seeing reason.

At this time when our politicians become strong domestic tourists, like the Japanese tourists of the past, covering twenty locations in a single day, it is good for them to reflect on why the migrant birds come over to rest and nest in our swamps.

It is good for them to reflect that these bio-diversity treasure troves are not playgrounds to be filled up to build housing schemes or roadways or to be sold at will to those with the riches to do as they please. It is time for them to reflect that our heritage sites and heritage buildings are not to given to the highest bidder to turn them into hotels without much thought on the alternative uses that they can be put to.

It is time, that they reflect on how communities can benefit from what mother nature and our leaders in the ancient times, have built for us through operating a tourism, that would benefit them all, as strong stakeholders. It is time for them to reflect, beyond this petty little election, to what is good for our nation and her people.

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