Tourism Authority set for August 1 launching
By Miranda La Rose
Stabroek News
June 22, 2002
The Ministry of Tourism, Industry and Commerce aims to establish the much-vaunted Tourism Authority by August 1.
It also plans to develop a website in association with international agencies to promote Guyana's nature-based tourism, Tourism Minister, Manzoor Nadir said.
Speaking with the media two Fridays ago on the occasion of his one year in office, Nadir said that over the next six months the Tourism Authority will be established along with the institutional mechanism to facilitate the work of the authority. "August 1 is the date we are looking at to get the board established", he said. Nadir was appointed minister of Tourism, Industry and Commerce on June 15, 2001.
The ministry is in the process of identifying an office to house the authority and advertising for positions to man the authority. There are sufficient funds, some $20 million in the national budget to operationalise the authority, he said.
The former chess association hall on Main Street had been identified to house the Tourism Authority but parts of the building have since collapsed. President Bharrat Jagdeo had announced at the `Main Big Lime' in November 1999 that the building would have been renovated with funding from the European Union. The funding, he said, had been confirmed at the Fifth Joint Meeting of the Executive Committee of CARIFORUM in Santo Domingo that year. Nadir said that the passage of the Tourism Authority bill was the key achievement in the sector during his term as it had been suggested since 1994. He said that the long gestation period was to also ensure that stakeholders had enough time to peruse the draft. While there might be some in the industry who did not like it, it was well supported by the tourism sector, he added. When he took over the sector, he said, there was "no formal tourism legislation" though lots had been done over the past ten years since the industry was being promoted.
Nadir also feels that during his first year "we embarked on an aggressive tourism programme... [to] let our own people know the potential tourism has to turn around the economy and to encourage those who have finances, of the opportunities to develop the industry." He said that staff in the Tourism Division spoke of tourism to the point of saturation.
He was pleased that at the Miss Guyana Universe pageant, three of the five finalists had said that they would invest in tourism had they been given a $1 million for an investment. Almost every pageant, he said, has focused on tourism. Another pageant to be held soon, he noted, would be focusing on eco-tourism. Tourism awareness, he said, was now not limited to the coastland but had been spread throughout the length and breadth of Guyana.
Another major achievement over the last year, he said, was networking between the ministry and the Tourism and Hospitality Association of Guyana (THAG) on promotional programmes in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom and Canada. They also hold regular monthly meetings and have progressed to the stage where they are now sharing each other's work programmes. In this way, Nadir said, the stakeholders in the industry were aware of the ministry's work programme and will be able to tailor their marketing programme to dovetail with the ministry's.
Meanwhile, he said that the ministry continued the work of developing tourist attractions such as the Lethem rodeo site, Bartica Regatta Pavilion, the Georgetown Seawall, the Kaieteur National Park, Orinduik and Number 63 Beach.
His predecessor, former minister of trade, tourism and industry, Geoffrey Da Silva, started working on the facilities at Lethem and Bartica. Lethem now has a pavilion and permanent exhibition booths and will soon have electricity on a 24-hour basis. Work has also been completed on the pageant area of the Bartica pavilion and on installing proper sanitary facilities and an overhead tank. Funds for these projects were provided by the ministry. In the Georgetown Seawall project the ministry installed 12 streets lamps, as well as a number of new benches. The old benches are being refurbished.
The guest house at Orinduik, he said, received furnishings provided by Precision Woodworking Ltd and a number of benabs are under construction.
In relation to Kaieteur Falls, he said that the ministry was able to get Cabinet to agree on the establishment of a joint management committee comprising representatives of the Tourism Ministry, the Ministry of Local Government and Regional Development, the National Parks Commission and the Kaieteur National Park Board, to pay more attention to it. The ministry, he said, got Cabinet to sign on to a programme to repair the guest house and the wardens' quarters and to install sanitary facilities at a cost of $5 million.
In operationalising the Tourism Authority, Nadir said that plans were in train to develop a tourism website in association with a few international agencies.
At present, he said, the ministry was negotiating with the Inter-American Development Bank for funding.
The objective, he said, was to install a comprehensive tourism information system in which the ministry would work closely with the private sector to enhance the development of the sector.