Tourism news: stay peaceful and reap from tourism

(eTN) Kenya tourism stakeholders are sending out the message to stay peaceful and reap from tourism, with an eye on the August referendum on a new constitution put before the Kenyan people to vote on.

(eTN) Kenya tourism stakeholders are sending out the message to stay peaceful and reap from tourism, with an eye on the August referendum on a new constitution put before the Kenyan people to vote on. However, the countryโ€™s political elite is divided, and two camps have emerged of almost equal strength, the “red” NO campaign led by dissident government figures now threatened with the sack from the cabinet and the “green” YES campaign to which the majority of the cabinet belongs.

The referendum, expected to be hotly contested, will be a measure of maturity and can show the world that Kenya has indeed learned valuable lessons from the post-election violence, which threatened to sink the country into anarchy and had the tourism industry all but collapse โ€“ in spite of not a single tourist having come to harm in late 2007 and the first few weeks of 2008.

The Kenyan tourism sector is, however, reasonably confident that the two opposing camps will this time not resort to violence to change results and have professed their trust in due process. Much is at stake, as tourism has recovered since but at a high cost of working the global markets as intensely as never seen before, bringing record numbers of visitors to the country in the first 6 months of the year.

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Linda Hohnholz

Editor in chief for eTurboNews based in the eTN HQ.

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